![]() There is not enough evidence yet to say for certain. Lemaitre and Muller have speculated that the candy-striped hermit crab may be working in a mutually beneficial partnership with the other species, perhaps removing parasites from the larger creature. “It seemed like the candy-striper was picking something off the skin of the spotted moray eel, which was interesting.” “I did see one with a spotted moray eel once that was injured,” Muller says. The animals seem to tolerate each other and may benefit from each others presence. Typically, Muller has seen the hermit crabs in crevices within underwater dens shared by lobsters and moray eels. I've gone back many times to see the first ones that I found. “I found them at a couple of different dive sites. But Muller pulled it off and then started to find the candy-striped crabs in other places as well. Trying to find the exact same spot with the exact same lobster den and the same tiny hermit crab seemed to be an order of magnitude more difficult than finding a needle in a haystack. I dive a lot at night to see things that most people don't see.” “I love looking for unusual and cryptic creatures that most people would go right by,” Muller says. What sets Muller apart is her willingness to dive at night and look very closely for the tiniest creatures. Muller is an American ex-pat who has lived since 1980 on Bonaire, a popular tourist destination in the Dutch Antilles, where thousands of divers each year take underwater photos and videos of creatures living among the easily accessed coral reefs. In 2001 Muller took up SCUBA diving and underwater photography. I dive a lot at night to see things that most people don't see,” says Ellen Muller, who named the new species after her granddaughter. He realized that this was probably a new species but in order to be certain, he would need better photographs and then physical specimens. The colors and the claw shape of this thumbnail-sized crab were unlike anything that Lemaitre, a hermit crab expert, had ever seen before. ![]() “The morphology was something that was not common.” “Ellen Muller sent me the first photograph and I realized right away it was something that had not been reported,” Lemaitre says. ![]() “She's seven so she doesn't quite understand it all but she's very happy about it.” ![]() At Muller's request, Lemaitre named the species after her granddaughter, Molly, “to inspire her to appreciate and protect the marine life once she grows up,” Muller says. The new species has been given the Latin name, Pylopaguropsis mollymullerae. The new species, which Muller has given the common name of “candy-striped hermit crab” due to its red and white stripes, has just been described in a paper by Rafael Lemaitre, a research zoologist at Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History and the curator of decapod Crustacea. She hadn't even noticed it while taking the picture. Little did she realize at the time that besides expertly framing and lighting her picture of a brightly colored lobster, she had discovered a completely unknown species of hermit crab lurking in the background of her photograph.Īfter her dive, Muller looked at the image of the lobster on her computer screen and realized that the tiny crab behind it wasn't a species that she recognized from her many other dives in the area. On a nighttime SCUBA dive in waters off of the Caribbean island of Bonaire, Ellen Muller moved in close to photograph a flaming reef lobster with a red light that wouldn't scare animals the way that a standard white light might. ![]()
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