Thalassinidea is a former
infraorder of
decapod crustaceans that live in
burrow
An Eastern chipmunk at the entrance of its burrow
A burrow is a hole or tunnel excavated into the ground by an animal to construct a space suitable for habitation or temporary refuge, or as a byproduct of locomotion. Burrows provide a form of sh ...
s in
mud
A MUD (; originally multi-user dungeon, with later variants multi-user dimension and multi-user domain) is a Multiplayer video game, multiplayer Time-keeping systems in games#Real-time, real-time virtual world, usually Text-based game, text-bas ...
dy bottoms of the world's
oceans. In
Australian English
Australian English (AusE, AusEng, AuE, AuEng, en-AU) is the set of varieties of the English language native to Australia. It is the country's common language and ''de facto'' national language; while Australia has no official language, Engli ...
, the
littoral thalassinidean ''
Trypaea australiensis
The Australian ghost shrimp, marine yabby, or ghost nipper (''Trypaea australiensis'') is a species of ghost shrimp in the family Callianassidae, found in Australia and the Indo-West Pacific
The Indo-Pacific is a vast biogeographic regio ...
'' is referred to as the ''yabby'' (a term which also refers to freshwater
crayfish
Crayfish are freshwater crustaceans belonging to the clade Astacidea, which also contains lobsters. In some locations, they are also known as crawfish, craydids, crawdaddies, crawdads, freshwater lobsters, mountain lobsters, rock lobsters, mu ...
of the genus ''
Cherax''), frequently used as bait for estuarine
fishing; elsewhere, however, they are poorly known, and as such have few
vernacular names, "mud lobster" and "ghost shrimp" counting among them. The burrows made by thalassinideans are frequently preserved, and the fossil record of thalassinideans reaches back to the late
Jurassic.
The group was abandoned when it became clear that it represented two separate lineages, now both recognised as infraorders:
Gebiidea and
Axiidea.
Recent
molecular analyses have shown that thalassinideans are most closely related to Brachyura (
crab
Crabs are decapod crustaceans of the infraorder Brachyura, which typically have a very short projecting "tail" (abdomen) ( el, βραχύς , translit=brachys = short, / = tail), usually hidden entirely under the thorax. They live in all the ...
s) and
Anomura (
hermit crabs and their allies). There are believed to be 556 extant species of thalassinideans in 96 genera, with the greatest diversity in the tropics, although with some species reaching
latitudes above
60° north. About 95% of species live in shallow water, with only three taxa living below .
See also
*''
Thalassinoides
''Thalassinoides'' is an ichnogenus of trace fossil used to refer to "dichotomously or T-branched boxworks, mazes and shafts, unlined and unornamented". Facies of ''Thalassinoides'' increased suddenly in abundance at the beginning of the Mesozoic ...
''
References
Arthropod infraorders
Obsolete arthropod taxa