Mad Taxonomic Skillz III – Crustacean Hunt!

Image adapted from the book cover of New Crustacean Species from the Phillipines.

This week’s Mad Taxonomic Skillz challenge will utilize the awesome freely available resource for everything crustacean – Crustacea.net!

We think that if crustaceans were easier to identify and to learn about, then they would be used more often in survey work, in ecological studies and by young taxonomists. We also think that if they could be identified more efficiently and more accurately, then the quality of all studies using these animals would be greatly enhanced.

The task is enormous. There are currently more than 800 families of crustaceans and well over 40,000 species. Although some groups such as crabs and shrimps are reasonably well known on a world-wide basis, other groups, such as amphipods, are well known for only a few geographic areas.

There is a lot of great information on the website and it is laid out well for completed groups. Unfortunately, there are few groups totally completed. Your mission should you choose to accept it is to find me a crustacean with the following criteria.

1) Newest Order of Crustacea

2) Head fused to first segment

3) Eyestalks and rostrum absent

Believe it or not this is all you should to get you to the right species. I’ll post a hint Tuesday if no one gets it by then. Previous winners are excluded from Glory on the Mad Taxonomic Skillz Wall of Fame. Rules are post your answer as a comment leave your name a you would like to be acknowledged and valid email address.

10 Replies to “Mad Taxonomic Skillz III – Crustacean Hunt!”

  1. Awesome! I almost blurted out, “Remipedes” but realized at the last second that I couldn’t narrow it down to a single species. I had actually not heard of the Mictaceans until now; they seem like a really neat, poorly understood order.

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