BIOLOGISTS claim to have discovered a new species of freshwater crab in Mindanao, which would be added to 1,300 species of such crabs distributed throughout the tropics and subtrropics.
One of the marine biologists behind the discovery, Jose C.E. Mendoza of the National University of Singapore, in an interview with GMA News, said this was the “fruit of collaborative work.”
“It’s a new species of freshwater crab from Barangay Seloton, in Lake Sebu, South Cotabato. My co-author purchased it from a vendor who was selling crabs and freshwater fish for food,” Mendoza said.
There are around 1,300 species of freshwater crabs, distributed throughout the tropics and subtropics, divided among eight families which show direct development and maternal care of a small number of offspring, in contrast to marine crabs which release thousands of planktonic larvae.
The total number of species of freshwater crabs, including undescribed species is thought to be up to 65 percent higher, potentially up to 2,155 species, although most of the additional species are currently unknown to science.
Mendoza said “Vendors and markets, especially in remote or understudied areas, are one of the first places we look [for] when we survey the biodiversity of those areas…how do people interact with or utilize this biodiversity?”
Mendoza is a lecturer at the National University of Singapore, while his co-author Emerson Y. Sy is based in the Philippine Center for Terrestrial and Aquatic Research.
The details of their serendipitous discovery will be published in the Michael Türkay Memorial Issue of the journal “Crustaceana.”
Mendoza described Türkay as a “carcinologist from the Senckenberg Museum and Research Institute in Frankfurt, Germany” and the new species—Sundathelphusa miguelito—is named after him.
“[This is an important discovery] because of the very nature of freshwater crabs. As their name suggests, they are highly dependent on good and healthy freshwater habitats, and because of this, they tend to have very limited distribution ranges,” Mendoza said.
“This species is very likely to be endemic to Mindanao, and worthy of conservation and further study,” he added.
Sundathelphusa miguelito is only the 5th species of freshwater crabs in Mindanao. The most recent discovery was in Agusan del Sur Province in 2001 (Sundathelphusa hades).
Three other species were discovered decades earlier—Sundathelphusa mistio (1904), Sundathelphusa montanoanus (1904), and Sundathelphusa wolterecki (1937).
He and Sy note in their paper that Sundathelphusa miguelito is “regularly collected and sold as food by ambulant fish vendors to nearby municipalities of the province.”
“Yes, it is edible. Most freshwater crabs are. [But caution should be up since] they are known vectors of lung flukes, which cause paragonimiasis in humans who eat them raw,” Mendoza explained.
Mendoza has previously written on other freshwater crabs species, including Sundathelphusa cagayana from Penablanca, Cagayan (described in 2010); Sundathelphusa niwangtiil, from southern Negros (described in 2015); Sundathelphusa orsoni, from northern Negros (described in 2015); and Isolapotamon maranao from Lanao del Sur (described in 2014).