Squat lobster

Squat lobsters are dorsoventrally flattened crustaceans with long tails held curled beneath the cephalothorax. They are found in the two superfamilies Galatheoidea and Chirostyloidea, which form part of the decapod infraorder Anomura, alongside groups including the hermit crabs and mole crabs. They are distributed worldwide in the oceans, and occur from near the surface to deep sea hydrothermal vents, with one species occupying caves above sea level. More than 900 species have been described, in around 60 genera. Some species form dense aggregations, either on the sea floor or in the water column, and a small number are commercially fished. The two main groups of squat lobsters share most features of their morphology. They resemble true lobsters in some ways, but are somewhat flattened dorsoventrally, and are typically smaller, ranging from 0.7 to 3.5 inches in length. Squat lobsters vary in postorbital carapace length (measured from the eye socket to the rear edge), from in the case of Munidopsis aries, down to only a few millimetres in the case of Galathea intermedia and some species of Uroptychus. As in other decapod crustaceans, the bilaterally symmetrical body of a squat lobster may be divided into two main regions: the cephalothorax (itself made up of the cephalon, or head, and the thorax), and the pleon or abdomen. The pleon only being partly flexed under the cephalothorax and the cephalothorax being more long than it is broad makes the squat lobster a morphological intermediate between a lobster and crab. The cephalothorax is made of 19 body segments (somites), although the divisions are not obvious and are most easily inferred from the paired appendages. From front to back, these are the two pairs of antennae, six pairs of mouthparts (mandibles, maxillae, maxillules and three pairs of maxillipeds), and five pairs of pereiopods. The cephalothorax is covered with a thick carapace, which may extend forwards in front of the eyes to form a rostrum; this is highly variable among squat lobsters, being vestigial in Chirostylus, wide and often serrated in some genera, and long, narrow, and flanked with "supraorbital spines" in others.

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Related concepts (2)

Crustacean

Crustaceans belong to the subphylum Crustacea (krəˈsteɪʃə), and form a large, diverse group of arthropods including decapods, seed shrimp, branchiopods, fish lice, krill, remipedes, isopods, barnacles, copepods, amphipods and mantis shrimp. The crustacean group can be treated as a subphylum under the clade Mandibulata. It is now well accepted that the hexapods (insects and entognathans) emerged deep in the Crustacean group, with the completed group referred to as Pancrustacea.

Seafood

Seafood is any form of sea life regarded as food by humans, prominently including fish and shellfish. Shellfish include various species of molluscs (e.g. bivalve molluscs such as clams, oysters and mussels, and cephalopods such as octopus and squid), crustaceans (e.g. shrimp, crabs, and lobster), and echinoderms (e.g. sea cucumbers and sea urchins). Historically, marine mammals such as cetaceans (whales and dolphins) as well as seals have been eaten as food, though that happens to a lesser extent in modern times.