The velvet crab, or alternately ''velvet swimming crab'', ''devil crab'', “fighter crab”, or ''lady crab,'' ''Necora puber'', is a species of
crab from the North-East Atlantic and the Mediterranean. It is the largest of the swimming crab family (
Portunidae
Portunidae is a family of crabs which contains the swimming crabs.
Description
Portunid crabs are characterised by the flattening of the fifth pair of legs into broad paddles, which are used for swimming. This ability, together with their strong ...
) found in
British
British may refer to:
Peoples, culture, and language
* British people, nationals or natives of the United Kingdom, British Overseas Territories, and Crown Dependencies.
** Britishness, the British identity and common culture
* British English, ...
coastal waters. The Onychophora is split into living families, the Peripatidae and Peripatopsidae. The Peripatidae family shows populations in West Africa, Southeast Asia, and Neotropics with the only remains of fossils representing the members of the crown-group Onychophora. The Peripatopsidae family shows distribution in parts of Chile, South Africa, and ''Australia''. It has a
carapace width of up to , and is the only species in the genus ''Necora''.
Its body is coated with short hairs, giving the animal a
velvet
Weave details visible on a purple-colored velvet fabric
Velvet is a type of woven tufted fabric in which the cut threads are evenly distributed, with a short pile, giving it a distinctive soft feel. By extension, the word ''velvety'' means ...
y texture, hence the
common name. It is one of the major crab species for
United Kingdom
The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, commonly known as the United Kingdom (UK) or Britain, is a country in Europe, off the north-western coast of the European mainland, continental mainland. It comprises England, Scotlan ...
fisheries, in spite of its relatively small size.
The velvet crab lives from southern
Norway
Norway, officially the Kingdom of Norway, is a Nordic country in Northern Europe, the mainland territory of which comprises the western and northernmost portion of the Scandinavian Peninsula. The remote Arctic island of Jan Mayen and the ...
to
Western Sahara
Western Sahara ( '; ; ) is a disputed territory on the northwest coast and in the Maghreb region of North and West Africa. About 20% of the territory is controlled by the self-proclaimed Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic (SADR), while the ...
in the
North Sea
The North Sea lies between Great Britain, Norway, Denmark, Germany, the Netherlands and Belgium. An epeiric sea, epeiric sea on the European continental shelf, it connects to the Atlantic Ocean through the English Channel in the south and the ...
and in North
Atlantic
The Atlantic Ocean is the second-largest of the world's five oceans, with an area of about . It covers approximately 20% of Earth's surface and about 29% of its water surface area. It is known to separate the " Old World" of Africa, Europe an ...
as well as in the western parts of the
Mediterranean Sea
The Mediterranean Sea is a sea connected to the Atlantic Ocean, surrounded by the Mediterranean Basin and almost completely enclosed by land: on the north by Western and Southern Europe and Anatolia, on the south by North Africa, and on the ...
, on the rocky bottom from the
shoreline
A shore or a shoreline is the fringe of land at the edge of a large body of water, such as an ocean, sea, or lake. In physical oceanography, a shore is the wider fringe that is geologically modified by the action of the body of water past a ...
to a depth of about . The last pair of
pereiopods are flattened to facilitate swimming.
References
External links
Basic information about ''Necora puber''*
Portunoidea
Crabs of the Atlantic Ocean
Crustaceans described in 1767
Taxa named by Carl Linnaeus
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