Red Knight (Cancer)
| Red knight | ||||||||||||
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| Epimeria rubrieques | ||||||||||||
| De Broyer & Klages , 1991 |
The Red Knight ( Epimeria rubrieques ) is a crustacean from the order of amphipods and lives as predators and scavengers in the Antarctic Weddell Sea . The species grows to between 1.5 and 7 centimeters long and has a beetle-like shape with a comb of thorns on its back. Their bright red color is used for camouflage, as only higher-frequency blue light penetrates into the deep sea and red is therefore invisible.
Along with Alicella gigantea and Thaumatops loveni, the Red Knight is one of the largest amphipods, its closest relatives are Epimeria macrodonta and Epimeria similis . Most of the time, the crab lies in wait for the prey, is rather sedate and rarely swims.
The taxonomy within the suborder Gammaridea has undergone some changes since the first description of the Red Knight in 1991 by Claude De Broyer and Michael Klages, so that the Paramphithoidae family no longer seems to be used, at least the genus Epimeria is now classified in the Epimeriidae family , which in turn is sometimes directly classified under the subordination of the Gammaridea, but mostly there in the superfamily Eusiroidea.
Web links
Individual evidence
- ^ "A new Epimeria (Crustacea, Amphipoda, Paramphithoidae) from the Weddell Sea" by De Broyer and Klages in Antarctic Science , 3 1991, pp 159-166. Summary
- ↑ Taxonomic classification Paramphithoidae , the family to which the Red Knight was originally assigned
- ↑ Classification of Epimeria under Epimeriidae directly under Gammaridea ( Memento of the original from October 17, 2013 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. at the University of Michigan
- ↑ Classification of Epimeria under Epimeriidae, superfamily Eusiroidea at Mount Desert Island Biological Laboratory
- ↑ Classification under Eusiroidea at uniprot.org
