June 14, 2019--Crustateans

I'm not sure if we got to talking about crustaceans because we were having a fried clam and lobster dinner at the Pemaquid lobster pound and wondered if they both were (the lobsters, yes; the clams, no) or because one of the answers on Jeopardy the night before was, "What is a crustacean?" to the question, "Shrimp and lobsters."

But talking about them we were.

All I knew is that they have exoskeletons--their shells. Neither I nor Rona knew much else but we were curious how many kinds of crustaceans there are and which one is he largest. In regard to the latter, we assumed the answer would be icky and that we wouldn't like to run into one in the surf off Coney Island.

We were right about that. According to Wikipedia the largest crustacean is big, very big--the Japanese Spider Crab, which can have tentacles that span 18 feet (see picture below), weigh 42 pounds, and is sure to give one nightmares. In fact, I had such a dream last night. I was floating around in the Mediterranean and one scooped me up and dragged me to its underwater cave for nothing good.

For the scientist in you here's a sample from Wiki--

Crustaceans (Crustacea /krʌˈsteɪʃə/) form a large, diverse arthropod taxon which includes such familiar animals as crabs, lobsters, crayfish, shrimps, prawns, krill, woodlice, and barnacles. The crustacean group is usually treated as a subphylum, and because of recent molecular studies it is now well accepted that the crustacean group is paraphyletic, and comprises all animals in the Pancrustacea clade other than hexapods. Some crustaceans are more closely related to insects and other hexapods than they are to certain other crustaceans.

The 67,000 described species range in size from Stygotantulus stocki at 0.1 mm (0.004 in), to the Japanese spider crab with a leg span of up to 3.8 m (12.5 ft) and a mass of 20 kg (44 lb). Like other arthropods, crustaceans have an exoskeleton (yes!), which they moult to grow. They are distinguished from other groups of arthropods, such as insects, myriapods and chelicerates, by the possession of biramous (two-parted) limbs, and by their larval forms, such as the nauplius stage of branchiopods and copepods.

Enough?

What jumps out for me is the fact that there are 67,000 species of crustaceans. 67,000!

How do we know that? Who schlepped around the waters of the world to identify and name and collect them? Who sponsored this? In other words who paid for it? 

And how did whomever did this decide when they were 12 years old that this was what they decided to devote their lives to? 

I assume all 67,000 are gathered in a crustacean museum somewhere. Probably in Japan or France where at least a few thousand are considered to be delicacies.