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Welcome, you’ve somehow stumbled onto the miscellaneous crustaceans part of the field guide. Before you go on, we’ll tell you a big about the species we were in charge of researching. The subphylum Crustacea falls under the phylum Arthropoda. There are thousands and thousands of different species of crustaceans. They can be found in salt water, fresh water, and even land. Their unique features are a crusty shell made of organic material called chitin and a jointed exoskeleton. Crustaceans have three main body segments, the head, thorax, and abdomen. Some crustaceans we found in the different sites we visited included barnacles, shrimp, and lobsters. The organisms we found most often were barnacles (Nesochthamalus intertextus, Balanus amphitrite). Barnacles are usually very easy to find. They can be found in large groups on rocks, piers, boats, and whales. They’re about 1/2 centimeter to 3 centimeters in length and have hard outer plates to protect themselves. We also found a lot snapping shrimp (Alpheus sp.) and mantis shrimp (Gonodactylus mutatus, Pseudosquilla ciliata). Snapping shrimp can be identified easily because they have one large front claw and they make a snapping noise when fighting amongst each other. Mantis shrimp need to be handled carefully, they have thickened elbows that can slice fingers. When you take the proper precautions, collecting crustaceans is fun and easy. While researching our organisms, we learned a lot of fun facts about them, like: Gooseneck barnacles are considered to be a delicacy in some parts of the world, and there are over 30,000 species of crustaceans in the world. We gained a large amount of knowledge and we hope to share some of it with you through this online field guide.
Miscellaneous crustaceans include many different species such as crabs, barnacles, lobsters, and shrimps. We focused on barnacles and shrimps. For 500 million years, crustaceans have inhabited the earth. There are even fossils remaining in rocks from the Paleozoic era. Crustaceans are different from other species because they are known to have gills that utilize dissolved oxygen in the water. We studied barnacles. Barnacles relate to crustaceans by their many eating patterns. Barnacles have an operculum located in the middle of their body and it is used for mating and feeding patterns. They eat forms of plankton. The process is that they open their operculum and tiny plates that are stored in the body, release jointed limbs that comb the ocean surroundings for small particles and sweep food into their mouth. Barnacles are also known to have the largest penis due to their living conditions. Once barnacles are born, they swim around for a few weeks before finding a settlement. Once they locate a hard surface, usually by the shoreline, they paste themselves down. They usually clump and settle in groups. It is important for them have a long penis because they must extend into the closes neighbor, which could be a distance. Since they are stuck with whoever they land by, it is also a necessity that they act both as male and female. Barnacles come in different forms- acorn (flatter and no stalks), and goose (with stalks)- and sizes and colors. Barnacles that are purple are Nesochthamalus intertextus, these are native. Barnacles that are more brown are invasive. Barnacles are very interesting creatures, though all they do is attach themselves to hard surfaces and stay there all day, because they have important niches. During our studies we found different types of the acorn barnacles, such as Nesochthamalus intertextus, Euraphia hembeli (larges in Hawaii), Balanus trigonus, Balanus amphitrite, and Chthamalus proteus.
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