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Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English
crustacean
noun
EXAMPLES FROM CORPUS
▪ As if it were something cumulative that accrued around me, like the hardening shell of a crustacean.
▪ I bite into the succulent, still-warm-from-the-grill crustacean whose spice factor is near seismic.
▪ It seemed surprised when the crustacean raised its claws and valiantly fought back.
▪ One has elongated jaws for picking between the coral stems, another may specialise in cropping a particular kind of small crustacean.
▪ The vector of the parasitic worm is a tiny crustacean, Cyclops.
▪ These fish have developed remarkably tough gullets due to the high proportion of fresh water crustacean in their diet.
▪ This is a brown crustacean, half the size of the end of a pencil, that is extremely difficult to eradicate.
▪ Today there are about 35,000 species of crustacean - four times as many as there are of birds.
The Collaborative International Dictionary
Crustacean

Crustacean \Crus*ta"cean\ (kr?s-t?"shan; 97), a. (Zo["o]l.) Of or pertaining to the Crustacea; crustaceous. -- n. An animal belonging to the class Crustacea.

Douglas Harper's Etymology Dictionary
crustacean

1835, from Crustacea the class name. As an adjective, 1858 (earlier was crustaceous, 1640s).

Wiktionary
crustacean

n. Any arthropod of the subphylum ''Crustacea'', including lobsters, crabs, shrimp, barnacles and woodlice.

WordNet
crustacean
  1. adj. of or belonging to the class Crustacea [syn: crustaceous]

  2. n. any mainly aquatic arthropod usually having a segmented body and chitinous exoskeleton

Wikipedia
Crustacean

Crustaceans (Crustacea ) form a very large group of arthropods, usually treated as a subphylum, which includes such familiar animals as crabs, lobsters, crayfish, shrimp, krill and barnacles. Thanks to recent molecular studies, it is now well accepted that the crustacean group comprises all animals in the Pancrustacea clade other than hexapods. In other words, some crustaceans are more closely related to insects and other hexapods than they are to certain other crustaceans.

The 67,000 described species range in size from Stygotantulus stocki at , to the Japanese spider crab with a leg span of up to and a mass of . Like other arthropods, crustaceans have an exoskeleton, which they moult to grow. They are distinguished from other groups of arthropods, such as insects, myriapods and chelicerates, by the possession of biramous (two-parted) limbs, and by their larval forms, such as the nauplius stage of branchiopods and copepods.

Most crustaceans are free-living aquatic animals, but some are terrestrial (e.g. woodlice), some are parasitic (e.g. Rhizocephala, fish lice, tongue worms) and some are sessile (e.g. barnacles). The group has an extensive fossil record, reaching back to the Cambrian, and includes living fossils such as Triops cancriformis, which has existed apparently unchanged since the Triassic period. More than 10 million tons of crustaceans are produced by fishery or farming for human consumption, the majority of it being shrimp and prawns. Krill and copepods are not as widely fished, but may be the animals with the greatest biomass on the planet, and form a vital part of the food chain. The scientific study of crustaceans is known as carcinology (alternatively, malacostracology, crustaceology or crustalogy), and a scientist who works in carcinology is a carcinologist.

Usage examples of "crustacean".

It was littered with clams, crustaceans, squid, fish, ammonites of all sizes, all of them drowning in the air.

How long pride of that kind might survive in confrontation with the awareness that it was the arthropodan and crustacean intelligences that could travel between the star-worldsuniting them into an empire vaster than anything Alexander, Augustus, or Jesus Christ could ever have imaginedThomas did not know.

How long pride of that kind might survive in confrontation with the awareness that it was the arthropodan and crustacean intelligences that could travel between the star-worlds--uniting them into an empire vaster than anything Alexander, Augustus, or Jesus Christ could ever have imagined--Thomas did not know.

The water churning red with tiny crustaceans, the spouts of the humpbacks and the sei and bluefins, the tang of sea-salt and foam - I remembered the sea as if I had lived in the water for a million years.

The water churning red with tiny crustaceans, the spouts of the humpbacks and the sei and bluefins, the tang of sea-salt and foam-I remembered the sea as if I had lived in the water for a million years.

Molluscs and crustaceans were collected for ladles, spoons, bowls, and cups, as well as for their succulent morsels.

At the top of the bottle he noticed a crustacean from the Chonos Archipelago - a barnacle.

Of the few leaves which were examined, three contained entomostracan crustaceans.

In the first lot, my son examined seventeen bladders, including prey of some kind, and eight of these contained entomostracan crustaceans, three larvae of insects, one being still alive, and six remnants of animals so much decayed that their nature could not be distinguished.

The prey which they had captured consisted of entomostracan crustaceans.

Crustaceans and their slower molluskan relatives hunted along the shore.

Joseph perceived that the noctambulo was pulling small many-legged creatures, crustaceans of some sort, from nests eight or nine inches down in the mud.

Mammals, marsupials, monotremes, birds, reptiles, worms, insects, arachnids, crustaceans, planaria, nematodes, protists, fungi, even a horticultural center.

There was a lot of life to see less than a few feet from his nose: tiny crustaceans crawling through the gently bobbing mat, the flash of falling sunlight off the silver sides of small fish, the fine patterns of jellyfish drifting near the surface like abandoned, sodden doilies of fine lace.

We have managed once, briefly, to send humans to that depth in a sturdy diving vessel, yet it is home to colonies of amphipods, a type of crustacean similar to shrimp but transparent, which survive without any protection at all.