Tuesday Crustie: Teaser

Today’s Tuesday Crustie is a teaser for something up later this afternoon...

White shrimp (Litopenaeus setiferus).

I’m always struck with shrimp how different they look when alive, with all their fine appendages in action, to how they look after they’ve dies. Sadly, this is an animal that people are more familiar with seeing dead on a plate with some dipping sauce than alive.

Happy birthday to my research assistant

The guy on the right is my occasional research assistant. He helps out from time to time by shoveling through a bunch of sand looking for sand crabs, and runs animals from South Padre Island to the main campus for me. He’s celebrating his 70^thbirthday today, and he’s my dad.

Happy birthday, Dad! Have a great day, and thanks for letting your kid be a goof.

And that bit goes for you too, Mom. (She’s the one on the left.)

(And incidentally, if you think there’s something wrong with a man making his septuagenarian father do hard physical labour, relax: he was only 69 when this picture was taken. Next thing you know, you’ll be telling me I can’t have small children working 15 hour days.)

Photo by Jessica Murph, taken January 2010 on South Padre Island. Thanks, Jessica.

Tuesday Crustie: Lipstick

Barnacles (Pollicipes polymerus) from one of my old stomping grounds, Vancouver Island.

Photo by Minette Layne on Flickr. Used under a Creative Commons license.

Tuesday Crustie: Slaters

One day in Melbourne, Garry said something to me about slaters. As happened on more than one occasion while I was living in Australia, I looked at him with complete vacuity. Then, we played a quick 50 point round of my favourite game show at the time, Explain it to the dumb Canadian.

After several moments of the sort of frustrating dialogue you one person tries to find some way of explaining something very simple to someone with no reference point (e.g., explaining “ballet slipper pink” to someone blind; explaining Gwar to someone who has taste), the light finally dawned that he was talking about something like these:

“Pillbugs!”, said I. And Garry agreed, and we were finally back sharing some common understanding.

So there you have it: A quick tale of two scientists divided by a common language. Some day, I’ll tell the “texter” story.

This particular beast is Porcellio scaber, I think.

Photo by ivantotuga on Flickr, used under a Creative Commons license.

Tuesday Crustie: Racing stripes

Not identified on the webpage, but based on some similar looking pictures, I think it’s Lysmata amboinensis. Lovely whatever its species!

Photo by David Panevin from Flickr, used under a Creative Commons license.

Tuesday Crustie: Boxed in

Calappa flammea, also known as a box crab or shame-faced crab.

Not sure what it has to be ashamed of – it has lovely colours!

From here.

Tuesday Crustie: Millinery

Words fail me.

From here.

Science on the island (South Padre Island, that is)

Yesterday, I gave a talk at this new wonderful new building, the South Padre Island Birding and Nature Center.

I went in and chatted about something I hadn’t talked about in a good long while, which was mostly some of my doctoral work on sand crabs as examples of things that have been able to make a living on beaches. I also got in a little bit about mud shrimp and Donax. People seemed to enjoy it. They laughed at the right bits and tolerated a little bit of geekiness about motor coordination.

After the talk, it was a lovely day to walk around the walkways to see some of the vertebrates the area is famous for...

Even got to see some aquatic vertebrates...

And even a few more crustaceans: fiddler crabs out displaying to each other.

I’d like to thank the people who were willing to sit in a dark room for about an hour listening all the ways a sign can be wrong.

Tuesday Crustie: Boxer without gloves

Michal Grabowski sent this picture to the CRUST-L list with a request that people help identify this animal.

It comes from the Great Barrier Reef, I think it belongs to family Goneplacidae, but would like someone to verify it and if possible assign any generic name to it.

Everyone who replied suggested it is Lybia tesselata. One person offering the tidbit that it often has anemones in its claws, and is sometimes called the “boxer crab” or “pom pom crab.” There are no anemones on this particular specimen, but it’s great to look at regardless. Love the banding.

Tuesday Crustie: King with a hermit’s past

An artistic rendition of the red king crab, Paralithodes camtschaticus. Many know them as being featured in a certain reality television show on Discovery Channel, but there are many scientifically interesting features about them, too. For instance, these massive “kings” are actually most closely related to hermit crabs.

Don’t like Alaska? You can find this poster promoting several Alaskan cities and places in the contiguous 48 states, too.

Tuesday Crustie: Clawless

A couple of weeks ago, I suggested a sand crab identified as Blepharipoda occidentalis was probably Hippa. Here’s Hippa adactyla: a type specimen of Danish biologist J.C. Fabricius (from here). I love the antique look of this image.

Here’s a more modern image (from here).

Tuesday Crustie: Oh yes it is

Since last week I put up a picture of something claiming to be Blepharipoda occidentalis, but wasn’t, I thought it was only fair to put up something to show what the spiny sand crab really looks like.

I know the image isn’t great, but converting photos to digital when I was a grad student wasn’t as easy or as good as now.

Tuesday Crustie: Oh no it isn’t

Occasionally, as an academic, you have these moments of shock, when you recognize something that you have personally worked on and that you know about. These moments are often followed by disappointment, when you realize that it is completely wrong.

I was walking along the walkway on the South Padre Island World Birding Center, and come across this on a sign.

I was so pleased to see the name of the species I spent about six years working with for my Ph.D., and published four papers about: Blepharipoda occidentalis. And Blepharipoda are sometimes called mole crabs, though they more typically called sand crabs.

Then, the disappointments start.

First, that picture is not Blepharipoda occidentalis. That picture is probably some species of Hippa, which is not even in the same family as Blepharipoda.

Second, Blepharipoda occidentalis is a species that lives in California, not the Gulf of Mexico.

Third, there are no species of Hippa on South Padre Island, either. There are mole crabs on South Padre Island, but they’re Lepidopa and Emerita.

So this sign is wrong at least three different ways. The sign had the logo for NOAA on it. It’s surprising, because agencies like this usually have access to experts and the scientific literature.

And in among realizing all this, you also realize that you’re one of maybe a half dozen people in the world who would know or care.

Photo by Kevin Faulkes. Thanks, Dad.

Tuesday Crustie: “The flavour of the day is...”

“...strawberry.”

It’s always great to see inverts in the news, particularly crustaceans, but I have some misgivings about the stories that made this pretty wee beastie news-worthy...

They’re calling it the “strawberry crab.” This goes to show that something as mundane as finding a new invertebrate (which happens all the time) can make world news if you can give it something that copy-writers can sink their teeth into. Don’t get me wrong – this is a very pretty beast, but so are many other crusties, as the regular “Tuesday Crustie” feature has tried to show.

This AFP wire story has been picked up by many news services, Stories about it can be found in the Times, the LA Times, the Telegraph, the Daily Mail and elsewhere.

But this is a bad example of how to proceed in science. The Times article says (emphasis added):

“We will formally announce the discovery in a thesis to be published in the quarterly Crustaceana published in the Netherlands,” chief researcher Ho Ping-ho said.

“Scholars at the National University of Singapore have also found a male Strawberry Crab on a Pacific island and made it into a specimen. We plan to jointly write the paper to announce the discovery,” he added.

If I was on the Crustaceana editorial board, I’d be mightily pissed.

It sounds very much like the technical paper hasn’t been written, or even started! It’s bad form to say, “This is where it’s going to be published,” before you have:

• Completed the manuscript to journal specifications
• Submitted for initial editorial review
• Have had the manuscript peer reviewed
• Receive the comments of the reviewers and make any requested changes from them and the editor
• Get official acceptance from the editor; this is the absolute point you should get to, but there is still more...
• Receive page proofs and check for errors
• Submit proofing corrections

Journals reject papers all the frickin’ time. You can’t presume that your work is just automatically going to be accepted and published in general, much less in a specific journal. It implies that the journal lacks rigor, and that they’ll publish any old slop.

The Daily Mail article says:

Taiwanese crab specialist Wang Chia-hsiang confirmed Professor Ho’s finding.

No! Peer review is not asking one other person what he thinks. Wang might be close to Ho. There may be a conflict of interest there. I don’t know how closely Wang has scrutinized the material, or if others in the field will agree.

Several stories specifically mention how closely this animal resembles an already described species, Neoliomera pubescens. When you’ve got a putative “new” species – particularly in one of the more speciose animal groups in the world, with around 6,559 living species (De Grave et al. 2009) – that looks very much like an already described species, you have to:

• Comb the literature thoroughly to make sure you’re not re-describing something that has already been described
• Provide evidence that this falls outside the range of variation of Neoliomera pubescens

There will no doubt be rare cases where you want to get news out before the technical paper is published. But this is not one of them. It would not have killed anyone, or hurt anyone’s career, to do a proper job of the species description, have the paper accepted, and only then put out a press release.

Reference

De Grave, S., N.D. Pentcheff, S.T. Ahyong, T.-Y. Chan, K.A. Crandall, P.C. Dworschak, D.L. Felder, R.M. Feldmann, C.H.J.M. Fransen, L.Y.D. Goulding, R. Lemaitre, M.E.Y. Low, J.W. Martin, P.K.L. Ng, C.E. Schweitzer, S.H. Tan, D. Tshudy and R. Wetzer. 2009. A classification of living and fossil genera of decapod crustaceans. Raffles Bulletin of Zoology Supplement 21:1-109.

Tuesday Crustie: Celebrate diversity

First, you may be thinking that’s not a crustacean. It is... from a certain point of view. There’s a reasonable amount of evidence that insects are the direct descendants of crustaceans. This idea, which was deemed “goofy” on some crustacean email lists when I was a grad student, has been gaining more ground, in part due to studies of the similarities in the nervous systems.

Thus, insects are crustaceans – in the same sort of way that birds are dinosaurs.

Second, I wanted to remind everyone that this is the start of the International Year of Biodiversity. And insects are the most speciose group of animals on the planet, and beetles have the greatest number of species of insects. Insects are among the little things rule the world, as E.O. Wilson put it.

Photo by user Steve_C on Flickr. Used under a Creative Commons license.

Tuesday Crustie: Polka dots

The caption for this calls it a “new species” of marbled shrimp. It may or may not be new to science, but it was certainly new to me... It apparently belongs in the genus Saron.

Photo by user artour_a on Flickr, and used under a Creative Commons license.

Season’s Greetings

Tuesday Crustie: The only one on the web

This is an amphipod called Maera mastersi.

I came across a reference to another species in the same genus in a paper I was reading... and I couldn’t find a picture. So I tried searching for the genus name, and this was the only picture I found of any species in the genus. It’s a reminder of how far we are from cataloging the life on this planet.

Picture from here.

Regularly scheduled maintenance

From a memo I got on the 14^th:

As you know by now we are getting a new boiler for the Science building to replace the current one that is currently having performance issues.

If you’ve ever wondered what a boiler for a science building looks like, here it is:

I snapped these on my way into the building this morning.

It’s going to take a while to get those track divots back to normal.

Tuesday Crustie: Out of the past

Triops longicaudatus. “Triops is well known to paleontologists as one of the oldest known genera, with fossils from the Triassic that are barely distinguishable from modern day species.” – David Grimaldi

Photo by threefingeredlord on Flickr, and used under a Creative Commons license.