Areopaguristes tudgei. That's the name of a new species of hermit¹ crab² recently discovered on the barrier reef off the coast of Belize by Christopher Tudge, a biology professor at American University in Washington, D.C. Tudge has been interested in biology his whole life, from boyhood trips to the beach collecting crustaceans⁴（甲壳类） in his native Australia, to his undergraduate and PhD work in zoology⁵ and biology at the University of Queensland. He has collected specimens⁶ all over the world, from Australia to Europe to North and South America.

 

Until now, he has never had a species named after him. He only found out about his namesake（名义） after reading an article about it in the journal Zootaxa. Apparently⁷, finding out after-the-fact is standard practice in the highly formalized ritual of naming a new species.

 

The two crustacean³ taxonomists and authors of the paper who named the new crab after Tudge, Rafael Lemaitre of the Department of Invertebrate⁸ Zoology at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Natural History and Darryl L. Felder of the University of Louisiana-Lafayette's Department of Biology Laboratory for Crustacean Research, have known Tudge since he first came to Washington in 1995 as a postdoc research fellow at the Smithsonian.

 

 

Lemaitre and Felder have been collecting specimens on the tiny Belizean island for decades and for more than 10 years, they had asked Tudge -- who specializes in the structures of crustacean reproduction and how they relate to the creatures' evolutionary¹⁰ history -- to join them on one of their semiannual research outings. Finally, in February 2010, Tudge joined them on a tiny island covered with hundreds of species of their favorite fauna¹¹（动物群）.

 

It was crab heaven for a cast of crustacean guys.

 

"So you can take 40 steps off the island and you're on the edge of the reef, and then the back part of the reef is what they call the lagoon," Tudge recalled. "You slowly walk out into ever-increasing depths of water and it's a mixture of sand and sea grass and bits of coral, and then there's some channels. There's lots of different habitats there. Some islands are covered by mangroves（红树林）. So we would visit all the different habitats that were there."

 

"We would collect on the reef crest¹³, go and turn over coral boulders¹⁴ on the reef flat, snorkel¹⁶ over the sea grass beds. We pumped sand and mud to get things out of the ground. We walked into the mangroves and collected crustaceans from under the mangrove¹² roots. We even snorkeled in the channels in the mangrove islands."

 

But discovering the new species was much less involved: Tudge turned over a coral boulder¹⁵ in an intertidal area, saw 50 or so tiny crabs¹⁷ scrambling¹⁸ around, and stuck a dozen or so specimens in a bottle before going on with his work. Only later in the lab, under the microscope, was it determined¹⁹ that this isolated²⁰ little group of hermit crabs might be unique.

 

As the journal authors write: "Given this cryptic²¹ habitat and the relatively²² minute size of the specimens (shield length range = 1.0-3.0 mm), it is not surprising that these populations have gone unnoticed during extensive sampling programs that have previously²³ taken place along the Barrier Reef of Belize."

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