Parthenopids, with their triangular or hexagonal bodies, disarmingly long chelae and diminutive legs, are crabs that mock the already caricature-like proportions of brachyurans. One small species roams local seagrass meadows with impunity, picking up dirt to lose its trail and moving with wallpaper haste to lull lazy eyes. Other members of the family have developed a concave screen, in a broad shell that cloaks all their appendages save the stout primary claws. The laterally expanded margins, though somewhat comical in their suggestion of an incomplete and clumsily built creature, probably serve a defensive function and recall the shields held by medieval duelers to protect their limbs.
This broad dome, when overturned, reveals a squib of a beast with a paltry core, as if little was left over after the armoured assembly to build other vital parts, some of which are stowed in elevated chambers of the carapace. But for Cryptopodia, and Celatopesia in the New World, the resources diverted to upper body development yield returns in indifference, as most hungry fish overlook the crabs in their seat of rubble, and those few that detect a margin of error on the substrate face a pair of toothed palms and embedded slopes with no grippable edges. This habit of digging in when threatened could be why Cryptopodia fornicata, which was once common on local seabeds, is now scarce and in the red. For the cost of standing your ground in a climate of disinterest is easily written off when little else matters other than a desire to grow that consumes far more than what life can recreate.
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