Red King Crab

• taxonomíaFor all its name and looks, it is more closely related to the hermit crabs than to the true crabs.
• It was deliberately introduced into the Barents Sea by the Soviet Union in the 1960s and has since spread along the Norwegian coast, where it is at once a highly lucrative fishery and an invasive species that strips the seabed.
• The juveniles gather into pods of thousands of individuals piled on top of one another as a defence against predators.
• It has only three visible pairs of walking legs: the fourth is reduced and tucked away under the carapace.
• It is not native to the Atlantic: Soviet scientists introduced it deliberately into the Barents Sea between 1961 and 1969 to create a new fishery.
• It worked too well. Ten years later there was a breeding population, and it has spread east and west ever since; in Norwegian waters its range has advanced more than 430 km, about 13 km a year.
• Today it is both a valuable resource and an ecological problem: it eats molluscs, echinoderms, polychaetes and bottom-living crustaceans, and alters the soft-bottom fauna wherever it arrives.
• Its leg span reaches 1.8 m and it can weigh 11 kg.
• Norway and Russia manage it as a single shared stock through their joint fisheries commission.

Habitat & environment

Cold soft bottoms of the North Pacific and the Barents Sea, from 5 to 400 m

Sexual maturity

5-7 years

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