#hippidae

i hope you dont mind if i ask this, but do you have anything on crustaceans?? theyre some of my favorite animals!

Thank you so much pudding pop. I love crustaceans too. I haven't blogged a lot of them, but here's what I've done so far.

Herps and Birds (and More) (Posts tagged crustacean) (tumblr.com)

And, here's one of my favorites, a mole crab from the west coasts of North and South America...

Pacific Sand Crab (Emerita analoga), family Hippidae, order Decapoda, Laguna Beach, CA, USA

photographs by Peter J. Bryant

Odd little barrel-shaped crabs that live buried in sand in the wash zone, and filter food from the surf with their antennae. One poorly chosen common name is ‘sand flea’, which is also applied, more aptly, to beach amphipods. As the tide comes in and out, they’ll wait for a passing wave to fluidise the sand, and ride the water up or down the beach. Other species in the family are scavengers in the surf zone - often on the bodies of other mole crabs.

In the closely related Emerita, the males are so much smaller than the females that they can live clinging to her legs.

Working in gardens under the waves

This is a crustacean of the genus Hippa from Pentecost Island in Vanuatu. It's not clear what species, but it might be Hippa truncatifrons according to crustacean biologist Chris Boyko (American Museum of Natural History) who kindly identified it for me. When documenting small often endangered languages, linguists have to become familiar with all natural species that have a name as well as the various systems of biological taxonomy that differ from one language to another. Small language communities often have knowledge about rare species endemic to small territorial ranges. This rare knowledge is an important part of the shared heritage of humanity and is part of what is lost when a language disappears. 

Hippa crustaceans are polymorphic in colour, based on the sand habitat. This one was found under the waves on a beach of black and white pebbles which explains its colour in this particular case. In the Sa language of South Pentecost where this crustacean was found, it is known as

silpantear:

sil 'works in the garden'

pan 'under'

tear 'wave'

'It works in the garden under the waves'. That's nice.

It has been reported that H. truncatifrons feed on annelids and small crustaceans, including amphipods, in sands by using the third maxillipeds (Kato & Suzuki, 1992), working away in their 'gardens under the waves'.

Doing documentary linguistics opens windows on the world you never knew existed, until you enter such rooms of other minds ...