Black Pearls & Pea Crabs!

Hello again! I’ve been a bit busy with many of the changes that are taking place here at the Pearl farm but today we were harvesting a couple of experimental lots of Black-lipped pearl oysters (Pinctada mazatlanica) and we –of course- found what we expected -black and gray colored pearls- but we also found something quite unexpected: an unknown species of crab.

These pearl oysters had been seeded back in 2013 and were ripe for harvesting. This was possibly the largest experiment we had done with this species –remember we basically use and prefer the “Rainbow Lip pearl Oyster” which makes much more colorful and lustrous pearls.

The Black Pearls

These pearls are very baroque in shapes, the dominant color being gray with some very dark-black ones. Many keshi in the group.

Many more black-lips were seeded this year, so next year we will have more interesting results (these are experimental so you don’t have to grow them for the full 2 years…at least not for all of them).

Now, as I said before: we were expecting the usual things…pearls and the small Pontoniid shrimp that live inside the black-lips, but we found something else…crabs!

Leopard Pea Crabs

That is the name I gave them since I had never seen crabs like these before. And I had never –in my over 20 years of working with black-lips- ever seen these crabs before! The Rainbow-lips have their own variety of “Peanut crab” living inside them, they are cream colored and have a taller shell with very soft shells, but these are strikingly different. Very different.

The shells are more flattened, they seem to move faster than the others and are a bit more agile too…at least when comparing with the other variety but their dot checked body is what really makes them special…the Leopard pea crab, fierce name for such a small and harmless creature.

So, we found 4 of these crabs, 3 males and one female. They were each inside their own oyster shell host…alone and not in couples like the little shrimps do. You can watch this short video of these little crabs, narrated in Spanish and English (wait until you hear the language you want).

The specimens have been preserved so if you are a crab specialist and would like to take a look at these, identify them or even describe them as a new species please do let us know.

Black pearls and Pea Crabs…an odd but unique combination that you can only find here at the Cortez Pearl Farm in Guaymas, Sonora, Mexico.