Sally Hall, a PhD student at the National Oceanography Centre, Southampton, has discovered four new species of king crab from a pile of untagged specimens at the Smithsonian Collections of the National Museum of Natural History in Washington.
Hall noticed the unidentified specimens while reviewing the Smithsonian collection as part of her doctorate on the evolution of the king crab family, supervised by Dr Sven Thatje. Some of the specimens were collected more than 100 years ago.
'King crabs include some of the largest crustaceans currently inhabiting Earth and are fished particularly from the shallower waters of the polar regions, around the Barents Sea,' says Hall.
'It's really surprising that nobody noticed these species before,' she adds.
The new king crabs, known to biologists as lithodids, are:
- Paralomis alcockiana, from the Atlantic Ocean,
- Paralomis nivosa, from the Philippines,
- Paralomis makarovi, from the Bering Sea, and
- Lithodes galapagensis (pictured), the first king crab species recorded off the Galapagos Islands.
But this might be only the beginning. 'The oceans off eastern Africa, the Indian Ocean and the Southern Ocean are all particularly poorly sampled,' says Hall, which means that many other species may remain to be discovered.
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Sally Hall and Sven Thatje. Four new species of the family Lithodidae (Decapoda: Anomura) from the collections of the National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution. Zootaxa 2302: 31-47 (2 Dec. 2009)
http://planetearth.nerc.ac.uk/news/story.aspx?id=614
(Submitted by Matt Writer)
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