Hemigrapsus sanguineus
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H. sanguineus
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| Hemigraspus sanguineus |
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Hemigrapsus sanguineus, the Japanese shore crab or Asian shore crab, is a species of crab from East Asia. It has been introduced to several other shores, and is now an invasive species in North America and Europe.
Description
H. sanguineus has a squarish carapace, 2 inches (50 mm) in width, with three teeth along the forward sides; its pereiopods are marked with alternating light and dark bands.[2]
Ecology and life cycle
H. sanguineus is an "opportunistic omnivore" that prefers to eat other animals, especially molluscs, when possible.[3] It tolerates a wide range of salinities ("euryhaline") and temperatures ("eurythermic").[2]
Females produce up to 50,000 eggs at a time, and can produce 3–4 broods per year.[2] The eggs hatch into zoea larvae, which develop through four further zoea stages, and one megalopa stage, over the course of 16–25 days.[3] The larvae are planktonic, and can be transported long distances during their development into the benthic adults.[3]
Distribution
The native range of H. sanguineus is from Peter the Great Bay in southern Russia, to Hong Kong.[4] The first record outside its native range was from Townsends Inlet, Cape May County, New Jersey (between Avalon and Sea Isle City) in 1988.[2] From the 1990s, it spread as an invasive species and became increasingly common, now ranging from eastern Maine (Great Wass Island)[5] to North Carolina.[6]
In 1999, H. sanguineus was reported for the first time from European waters, having been discovered at Le Havre (France) and the Oosterschelde estuary (the Netherlands).[7] It has since been found along a long stretch of the continental coast of the English Channel, from the Cotentin Peninsula to the Dover Strait.[8] Its range extends further around the North Sea, at least as far as Schleswig-Holstein in northern Germany.[9] It has also been recorded from Guernsey and Jersey, and in Kent and south Wales.[10] There is a single record of H. sanguineus in the Mediterranean Sea – a 2003 sighting in the northern Adriatic Sea – and a single specimen has been collected from the Romanian coast of the Black Sea, near Constanța in 2008.[4]
References
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External links
- Species Profile – Asian shore crab (Hemigrapsus sanguineus), National Invasive Species Information Center, United States National Agricultural Library
