4 for the price of 1!

Do I have a deal for you today! (That statement feels exciting, hence the exclamation point, but it's so question-y that I really wanted a question mark. But I felt like that would ruin the momentum of the sentence. Much like this is right now. The dilemmas I face everyday...)

Exciting news, everyone! There are still new crabs to be discovered and met! You can still be an explorer and name things like Georg Steller or Charles Darwin or Hendrik Freitag (the researcher who described the new crabs in question). FOUR new species of freshwater crab were discovered on Palawan, a Philippine Island known for its rich diversity and endemic nature of over 50% of its species! (That means that half of the species found on Palawan are not found anywhere else, so it's really quite a treasure.)

The researchers were aware of the crab presence on the island, figuring they were some sort of Insulamon crab (previously defined in islands north of Palawan) but closer examination revealed the 4 new species:

Insulamon palawanense, I. magnum,
I. johannchristiani and I. porculum

top on my list of Most Beautiful Crabs:

the I. palawanense

I. magnum packs a punch!

(sadly no mustache...)

I. johannchristiani going for a more orange look

(perhaps wishing it's at the Jersey Shore?? Hey-oh!

But seriously, it's probably thankful it's not.)

I. porculum, named so for it's pink snout and corkscrew tail

(OK, not really, but I couldn't find a picture of a living

I. porculum and I wanted to spruce up this specimen)

Aren't they beautiful? The researcher's next focus will be freshwater crayfish and I'm so excited to see what they discover there!

A link to their scientific description:
Freitag, H. 2012.Revision of the genus Insulamon Ng & Takeda, 1992 (Crustacea: Decapoda: Potamidae) with description of four new species. The Raffles Bulletin of Zoology 60: 37–55.