Animalia > Arthropoda > Malacostraca > Decapoda > Menippidae > Menippe > Menippe mercenaria

Menippe mercenaria (Florida stone crab)

Synonyms: Cancer mercenaria; Pseudocarcinus mercenaria; Pseudocarcinus ocellatus

Wikipedia Abstract

The Florida stone crab, Menippe mercenaria, is a crab found in the western North Atlantic, from Connecticut to Belize, including Texas, the Gulf of Mexico, Cuba, The Bahamas, and the East Coast. The crab can also be found in and around the salt marshes of South Carolina and Georgia. It is widely caught for food. The closely related species Menippe adina (gulf stone crab) is sometimes considered a subspecies – they can interbreed, forming hybrids – and they are treated as one species for commercial fishing, with their ranges partly overlapping. The two species are believed to have diverged approximately 3 million years ago.
View Wikipedia Record: Menippe mercenaria

Attributes

Nocturnal [1]  Yes
Water Biome [1]  Coastal
Diet [1]  Carnivore, Planktivore

Prey / Diet

Aliger gigas (pink or queen conch)[2]

Prey / Diet Overlap

Predators

Caretta caretta (Loggerhead)[3]
Epinephelus morio (Red grouper)[3]
Mycteroperca microlepis (Velvet rockfish)[3]
Octopus briareus (Caribbean reef octopus)[3]
Pogonias cromis (Sea drum)[3]

External References

Citations

Attributes / relations provided by
1Myers, P., R. Espinosa, C. S. Parr, T. Jones, G. S. Hammond, and T. A. Dewey. 2006. The Animal Diversity Web (online). Accessed February 01, 2010 at animaldiversity.org
2Queen Conch Predators: Not a Roadblock to Mariculture, Darryl E. Jory and Edwin S. Iversen, Proc. Gulf Caribb. Fish. Inst. 35:108-111. (1983)
3Jorrit H. Poelen, James D. Simons and Chris J. Mungall. (2014). Global Biotic Interactions: An open infrastructure to share and analyze species-interaction datasets. Ecological Informatics.
Abstract provided by DBpedia licensed under a Creative Commons License
Species taxanomy provided by GBIF Secretariat (2022). GBIF Backbone Taxonomy. Checklist dataset https://doi.org/10.15468/39omei accessed via GBIF.org on 2023-06-13; License: CC BY 4.0