New species has been named “Kani maranjandu.”
Next time if you see a crab climbing tree, don’t think that you are the first one to spot it as a team of scientists have found a new crab species in the Western Ghats of Kerala that live on trees.
According to a research paper published in The Journal of Crustacean Biology, the new species of crab is different not only in their habitat but also its structure when compared to other congeners.
The scientists of the Kerala University found that the new crab specie, colloquially known as “Kani maranjandu”, has a distinct structure with a hard upper shell as well as its male abdominal structure and reproductive parts, and of course, its diagnostic elongated walking legs, which no other genus has.
According to the scientists, this is the first recorded sighting of a crab that lives on trees – arboreal crab. The Western Ghats of India is a melting pot of biodiversity but there is very little data available about the freshwater biodiversity especially with regards to crabs.
The journal says that the scientists were informed about the tree climbing crabs by the locals of Kanikkaran. They shared the details of a crab with long legs climbing trees in the area. For the last two years’ scientists were conducting studies in the area but without a single live sighting of the tree crab. On September 2016, the researchers finally found a female specimen of the crab and later a bigger adult male.
The new species has been named “Kani maranjandu” after the Kani tribe of Kerala that first reported the species. The specimens examined are deposited in the Zoological Survey of India and in the museum collection of the Department of Aquatic Biology and Fisheries, University of Kerala, India.
“As water holding hollows in large trees are essential for the survival of this unique species, the discovery also stresses the need for conservation of large trees in the degraded forest ecosystems of the Western Ghats,” said Dr. Biju Kumar, one of the authors of the study.
“It also highlights how little we know about the actual biodiversity that resides in these forests and the efforts that must still be made to find and study the many undoubted new species that still live there,” he added.