GONEPLAX RHOMBOIDES OUT OF THE BLUE

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My HIVE and real life friend @denisdenis, currently works on the fishing boat, and beside bringing the fresh & free cat food for my cats, directly from the open sea ...

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... he sometimes appears with strange stuff rarely seen here on the land ... and last week, among some Sea squirts (Tunicate), Turritella sea snails and the Pontobdella muricata leech ...

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... I had the opportunity to photograph this interesting, long-legged crab ...

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... that I never saw before. Today, while preparing the post, I found out that this is the Goneplax rhomboides, commonly known as the angular crab. It's a distinctive-looking species with lovely, vivid colors ... so it looked like something from the tropical seas at first sight, to me.

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You can see only the male with the characteristic long chelipeds, on these photographs. I saw the females only on a couple of pictures found on the Internet, and they look considerably different with much shorter pincer ... more like some more usual crab.
This crab is found in the Atlantic Ocean and in the Mediterranean Sea ... and generally speaking is not a rarity, but it's a rarity here on my terrace.

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This species lives on a muddy sea bed, at depths from ten to 700 meters and builds complex, branching burrows ... often interconnected with burrows of various fish and invertebrates burrowing species, like Callianassa subterranea shrimps, Cepola macrophthalma bandfish, and Lesueurigobius friesii goby fish.
I didn't know about this interesting underwater community, before working on this post.

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Here you can take a better, more up close look at the iconic pincers ...

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... and now, with this distant shot through a macro lens, is time to end this short excursion into the deep sea in front of my house ... is time to end this post - THE END.

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Here, after the end, it's a little artsy corner with some invert photoshop edits ... and that's definitely all ... as always in these posts on HIVE, the photographs are my work.



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12 comments
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Hihihijijijiji let let let the rare sea sweet whips be seen that are not seen often but essentially that they are in,,,,;))

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Your post is reblogged and upvoted by me. It is a good post. Thank you @borjan

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It has something like fangs, I see it in the photo, I never thought that this animal had tweezers , only the claws with which they catch their prey.
A very interesting post, sometimes we think we have a lot of knowledge, but we still have a lot to learn about the underwater world.

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Very funny crab, but what size is it?

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(Edited)

It's about the size of my hand ... which is a kind of medium-sized human hand :) not particularly large or small ... ... that's including the long legs ... the core body, the carapax it's pretty small.

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Well that's a pretty big crab! I thought it was macro, and it is about the size of a fingernail)

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