A tiny new crab, named for a salt-loving rice

On the mudflats of the Aghanashini River estuary in Karnataka — a Ramsar wetland on India's west coast — scientists have described a crab nobody had named before. Ilyoplax kagga, formally introduced in the journal ZooKeys, is a small intertidal crab that lives among oyster beds and upper mudflats; males carry a comb-like ridge of 22 to 24 tiny bumps they can rub to make sound. It is only the sixth member of its genus known from the Indian subcontinent, out of 28 worldwide. Its name is a love letter to its home: 'kagga' is a salt-tolerant rice that local farmers have grown for generations in the same salty landscape. A new species, named not for a scientist but for the rice in the next field — taxonomy rooted, literally, in the place it describes.

SDG 14 · Life below water