Crab Enjoyer @crab-enjoyer - Tumblr Blog

lowpolyanimals

Lobsters from Rugrats: Search for Reptar

dorothylarouge

eroscestlavie

Everyone envies me for my shrimp lighter

eroscestlavie

escuerzoresucitado

crabsinvideogames

Tangle Tower

decapod-of-the-day

Decapod of the day: Solenocera mutator

crab-misinformation

Much like how shrimp can see colours that we can't, crabs have an additional sense called the salifactory sense. This allows them to detect the levels of salt in their food far more effectively than humans can. This is, of course, rendered mostly useless by the fact that they live in the ocean, where everything is tainted by extra salt.

#unreality

cephalopodvictorious

bugs is…. shrimp????

decapod-of-the-day

Decapod of the day: Tozeuma carolinense | Arrow Shrimp

pending-trans-action-2

favorite word?

Birgus, a genus of hermit crabs containing only one species: Birgus latro. The coconut crab!

(Image credit: Brocken Inaglory, Wikipedia commons)

Originally named Cancer latro by Linnaeus, the genus name is likely derived from the Latin burgus, meaning a small fort, as named by Leach in 1816. No reason was given for this change in spelling in his work A tabular View of the external Characters of Four Classes of Animals, which Linné arranged under Insecta; with the Distribution of the Genera composing Three of these Classes into Orders, &c. and Descriptions of several New Genera and Species in 1816. Latro, on the other hand, means "robber" as named by Linnaeus (so named for one of its common names: the robber crab).

Birgus does exist in Latin, as the name of an Irish river but given their tropical habitat the connection is unlikely. Personally, I believe this was likely just another little spelling mistake in taxonomy (it is latin, after all) that just became formalised over time. It makes for a fun story though!

kqedscience

Watch these decorator crabs #werk the underwater runway in our latest episode of Deep Look!

vm-voidmaster

lobster

great-and-small

Reached out to a biologist to request some info about an extinct species of freshwater shrimp and the email she sent in response was not only lovely and helpful but also kind of poetry to me? People who study invertebrates are actually the most hopeful and compassionate scientists that we have.