We use cookies to improve your experience, some are essential for the operation of this site.

Illustration showing the different stages of crab development.

Illustration showing the different stages of crab development.
Illustration showing the different stages of crab development.
Illustration showing the different stages of crab development.
Illustration showing the different stages of crab development.
Comments (0)
405353
Gyory, Joanna
Illustration showing the different stages of crab development.
Illustration
07/16/2010
crab_stages.jpg
Caption from Oceanus magazine, vol. 48, no. 2, page 35:
A Circle of Life -- To reveal the previously unknown lifecycle of red land crabs, graduate student Joanna Gyory collected newly hatched zoea, the free-swimming larvae that emerge from eggs deposited in the sea. She raised the zoea in the lab and found that they undergo several zoea stages over 21 days until they metamorphose into a post-larval stage called megalopa, the final transformation before they become juvenile crabs. In the field, she observed that the first juveniles came ashore 30 days after the eggs were deposited. How long it takes for juveniles to become full adults remains an open question.
Note: Final illustration in the magazine displays 3 eggs while this illustration displays 1 egg.
Image Of the Day caption:
When Joanna Gyory, an MIT-WHOI Joint Program student, visited the Liquid Jungle Lab in Panama, one rainfall determined her thesis project. Just days after the year's first rain, thousands of colorful crabs boiled out of forest burrows, and raced for the sea to reproduce. Gyory found that the crabs were common, but no one knew their life cycle. Fascinated, she sampled the bay, reared the larvae, and elucidated most of the hard-to-culture animal's life stages and development timesa step toward understanding the species and the region's ecology.
Courtesy of Joanna Gyory
© Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution
Labels
This item includes these files
Image
Image
Collections