Micro Awesomeness

Hey y'all! I've been working all week pulling stomach contents out of baby Pacific cod (Gadus macrocephalus) and walleye pollock (Theragra chalcogramma). I know, I know. They're not crabs. They're not even crustaceans. BUT they eat crustaceans!

Boom! Euphausiid in the house!

It's not surprising to find one hundreds of these bad boys in a fish stomach. Euphausiids, or krill, are pretty ubiquitous and are the go-to prey item for a lot of animals, even the crabeater seal. The excitement in the lab this morning came from this guy:

"oof"

He's obviously different from the krill we'd been seeing all week. What sparked fellow Southampton College and University of Alaska Fairbanks alum (holla!) Casey Debenham's curiosity was that large claw.

that's a legit chela

Right off the bat we could tell this was a crab!! But what kind of crab? On further inspection, with the help of Emily Fergusson, stomach content pro, we saw that the left claw was quite a bit smaller than the right. This was the tipping point!

Do you know what it is? I'll wait while you guess.

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It's a hermit crab!

can you see it?

It's a Pagurid in the megalopae stage! Pretty cool right? I guess he hadn't settled yet to find a protective shell and was just chilling up in the water column. Had he not been eaten, he might have grown to look like this:

although he'd probably be rockin' a gastropod shell

Oh well. Circle of life, amirite?