crab with no eyes or shell freeky

was doing a bit of lug prospecting and due to the great surf the beach was full of cockles. Got home and sorted me lug and cracked open the cockles for tomorrow, found this little critter inside one of the cockles (living with the cockle )it has no eyes, never saw one before and i used to fish morcombe bay and would say i,ve opened alot of them and never seen one of these!!!!!!!!!!!!!

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thats small and wierd, first i have heard of it, but rag do live with hermit crabs

crazy red colouring! no idea what it is...

any marine biologists on this site??????

I've often seen the same red looking eyes on a Monday morning, maybe it's a drink related problem it has. 8) :oops: 8) :oops: 8)

weird looking creature allright, was its body hard, from the pic it looks gooey or something? Class find :D. :shock:

kinda soft and sqidgey but not as soft as a hermit :?:

looks more like a large mite than a crab... both similar in shape but mites have very small eyes.. and are parasitic..


did a little search.. its called an oyster crab or pea crab...


http://www.britannica.com/eb/article-9058847/pea-crab

seen small crab like that inside mussels never noticed that they had no eyes in fact any of the big mussels i got seemed to have one. similar colour as well

thought i found a new speciese the dodger crab has a nice ring to it :lol: :lol: :lol: thanks steve might have known you would hunt it down all i found was recepies :D was on holidays and a pub quizz question was how many legs has a crab got and of couse did i know :oops: :oops: how many of them have i whipped on a hook and never even looked :oops: :idea:then a row followed on if the pincers where legs :?:

They are fairly common in the mussel we get in Courtmac. Know nothing about them though!

Hello all, once a long time ago I did Marine Biology, I think this is the little fella you were looking at?!?

http://www.britannica.com/ebc/article-9058847

Also:

The pea crab, Pinnotheres pisum, is a small crab that lives symbiotically in oyster and mussel shells. They are about the size of a pea but can be up to the size of a small walnut. It is also commonly called the oyster crab. They have a large tail flap that is used to cover eggs under the body when they are breeding, adding to the spherical appearance.

It is found from southern Scandinavia to western Africa, and throughout the Mediterranean in the mantle cavity of such bivalve molluscs as mussels, and inside ascidians.

Although researchers once thought that pea crabs were not harmful to their hosts, they have since found that their activities do cause some damage to the delicate gills of bivalves; and as such, these crabs are now considered parasites.

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Mr. Pea Crab, a proper pain when sitting down to a saucepan of mussels :x Mussel farmers hate them as when an infestation occurs the price per tonne they receive for their product drops by about 25%

Feck that-are they any good for bait???