How much I missed

I’ve spent the last couple of days working on a review manuscript I was asked to do on digging. This was the subject of my doctoral work and a couple of subsequent papers I did in my second post-doc. I haven’t looked at it very much in a while.

And it’s little depressing.

For instance, here’s a figure from one of the papers arising from my Ph.D. work. It shows the limb movements of the mole crab Emerita analoga. I was pretty pleased that I was able to work out that the fourth pair of legs circle in the opposite direction at the second and third.


And today I found this picture from a 1942 paper. Different species (east coast here; mine was west coast), but digging should be very similar.


Love the very graceful lettering and drawing here, especially compared to my more modern figure.

Anyway, one of the key things I thought I’d learned, about how the fourth leg circles around in the opposite direction from the second and third, is shown really nicely here. Not sure about their uropod direction, though.

Why didn’t I find this when I was working on this all the time in grad school? Sure, Google Scholar didn’t exist then, but even so, finding something this spot on to what I was researching is a bit of a surprise. And this is just one example. There’s a lot of other stuff on crustacean digging that I’m just discovering for the first time.