Yeti Crab

• GeneralDiscovered in 2005; it farms bacteria on the hairs of its claws and eats them.
• It was so unlike anything known that an entire family, Kiwaidae, had to be created for it within the crustaceans.
• The bacteria it farms on its bristles live on chemical compounds in the hydrothermal fluid, with no dependence whatsoever on sunlight.
• It is blind: at the hydrothermal vents, 2,200 m down, no light reaches.
• It was discovered in March 2005 by the submersible Alvin, 1,500 km south of Easter Island at 2,200 m depth. It was so unlike anything known that it was given not merely a new species but an entire family: Kiwaidae.
• It is blind and covered in long white bristles that give it a furry look, which is where the name yeti crab comes from.
• Those bristles are a garden: on them it farms chemosynthetic bacteria that it later scrapes off and eats with comb-shaped mouthparts.
• To feed its bacteria it waves its claws in the hot plume from the vent, a movement that has earned it the nickname dancing crab.
• The genus honours Kiwa, the Polynesian goddess of shellfish; hirsuta is Latin for hairy.
• Other species in the genus have been described since, among them Kiwa tyleri, nicknamed the Hoff crab.

Skeleton type

Invertebrate - articulated calcareous exoskeleton (crustacean)

Habitat and environment

Hydrothermal vents at 2,200 m

Sources consulted: https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kiwa_hirsuta