A routine research exercise at the University of California, Santa Barbara, led to a surprising discovery that could have implications for some of California’s commercially important crab species. A team of students studying crab egg broods discovered a tiny crustacean known as a nicothoid copepod living among the eggs of local rock crabs. The finding, described in the journal Ecology, marks the first observation of these copepods off the Pacific Coast of the United States. The discovery came after students returned to hands-on laboratory research following the disruptions caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.
In late 2021, UCSB undergraduate students Sophia Lecuona Manos, Gabrielle Plewe and Carson Gadler, along with doctoral student Zoe Zilz, began working in parasitologist Armand Kuris’s lab. During one of the early lab sessions, a student noticed what appeared to be an unusually large, moving crab egg.
