🌿 Species: Ocellate Lady Crab (Ovalipes ocellatus)
📝 Notes: Fast-moving marine crab found along sandy beaches and shallow coastal waters of the western Atlantic. Recognizable by its pale shell covered in circular “eye-like” spots (ocelli) and long legs adapted for rapid sideways movement and shallow burrowing.
Often encountered in surf zones, tidal flats, or just beneath wet sand. Capable of burying itself quickly when disturbed.
Doodled during a Jackbox game. It is 10 PM. I just got out of a party, said Oh Shit I Haven't Drawn A Bug Yet Today, then realized that I did in fact draw some arthropods.
They were thoroughly defeated here btw. Definitely not the champions of failure.
doing a mermay-style thing focused on bugs this may! so...
may-fly 2nd: hatsune michura
i'm the number one "crustaceans are bugs" proponent, so, what better way to start off may-fly than with a crab? more info n stuff under the cut!
michura is, obviously, based on a crab! she isn't any one specific species or clade, i just kinda took the general look of a crab and put miku into it. her name comes from miku (duh) and brachyura, which is the infraorder under decapods that all so-called "true crabs" fall into
the idea for this came from when, a couple days ago, i just Completely misinterpreted miku fanart i saw on twitter, and thought she had crab eyes. immediately fell in love with the idea after hastily scribbling this out on my phone at like 12:30 in the morning
so! i had to learn crab anatomy for this. and it is. fucked up.
first and foremost: understanding how the hell their faces work. surprisingly, it's not as complex as you'd think. those rectangular "jaws" you see?
yeah, those are a pair of modified legs, neatly folded up, called maxillipeds. all the other mouthparts (including two other pairs of maxillipeds!) are tucked away behind those. so, thankfully, i only needed to give michura one pair of maxillipeds if i wanted to be particularly accurate!
something else i've learned that people tend to get wrong is how crab claws work. most people draw them opening from both sides, with a jagged and sometimes even hollow inside. but if you take a look at them on a real crab...
see that divide between the lower and upper "fingers?"
that's because only the top part of a crab's claw can move! the bottom part is just an extension of the "wrist" segment!
as for what's up with her arms... well, it's simple, really. i wanted to keep the claws because that's what crabs are known for, but i also wanted her to have more dexterous grasping appendages. originally both pairs of arms were on the torso, which was... more than a bit cluttered. i almost completely ditched the second pair, until-
"why not do two smaller front legs?"
in reference to how people give spider characters those weird stupid chelicera/palp/leg things. while i despise it on spiders... it's actually pretty in-line with how crabs are built, given their claws are just modified front legs! so, naturally, instead of putting the claws down there, i moved her hands down to where her frontmost legs would be, because i thought that would be kind of funny. i think it was a good call, honestly! since, i'd argue it's better for the more precise and dexterous grasping appendages to have the wider range of motion, and be able to reach the ground more easily, and i think it gives the design that "fucked up kind of weird" factor i really really like
uhhhh tldr, crab miku. i learned some stuff about crab anatomy in drawing her and now you have too
As with other bosses in the Ode to Castlevania DLC, Brachyura originally appeared as a boss in that series, specifically first appearing in Castlevania: Order of Ecclesia.
Strange Symmetries #20: The 16 Million Year Fiddler Crab Rave
Many decapod crustaceans have slightly asymmetrical pincers, often with one claw being chunkier and specialized for "crushing" while the other is more slender and used for "cutting".
But fiddler crabs take this sort of asymmetry to the extreme as part of their sexual dimorphism – males have one massively oversized claw, which is used for both visual display to potential mates and for physical fights against rivals.
Some of the earliest fiddler crabs are known from the Miocene of what is now northern Brazil. Although the fossils have been given several different taxonomic names since their discovery in the 1970s (including Uca maracoani antiqua, Uca antiqua, and Uca inaciobritoi) they're currently considered to be indistinguishable from the modern Brazilian fiddler crab, Uca maracoani, meaning that these crabs have remained externally unchanged for the last 16 million years.
Up to about 4cm in carapace width (~1.6"), modern Uca maracoani are found in coastal mangrove swamps and tidal mudflats around the northern and eastern coasts of South America – and some of these environments have also undergone little change since the Miocene. Males of the species can develop their enlarged pincer on either side of their bodies, with lefties and righties seeming to occur in equal numbers.
