Deep-sea Red Crab

• Like many animals of the slope, it grows slowly and matures late, so its populations take decades to recover from overfishing.
• It lives at depths sunlight never reaches and finds carrion by smell alone.
• It belongs to a genus of deep-water red crabs whose taxonomy has been troublesome: until the 1980s almost every species from the eastern Atlantic and the African coast of the Indian Ocean was wrongly identified as Geryon quinquedens, now restricted to the north-west Atlantic.
• Identification by morphology remains difficult because of the overlap between species, and since 2019 mitochondrial DNA has been used to tell them apart.
• Genetic analysis places it very close to Chaceon maritae, the species of the African coast.
• It is the spread of fishing into ever deeper water that has gradually revealed these crabs' global distribution and led to new species being described.

Skeleton type

Invertebrate - articulated calcareous exoskeleton (crustacean)

Habitat and environment

Muddy bottoms of the continental slope, between 200 and 2,000 m

Sources consulted: Manning y Holthuis (1981); Rodríguez-Álvarez et al. (2019), PLOS ONE; Instituto Español de Oceanografía