Portal:Arthropods

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Arthropods make up the largest phylum of animals (Phylum Arthropoda) and include the insects, arachnids, crustaceans and others. More than 80% of described living animal species are arthropods, with over a million modern species described and a fossil record reaching back to the late Proterozoic era. Arthropods are common throughout marine, freshwater, terrestrial, and even aerial environments, and includes various symbiotic and parasitic forms. They range in size from microscopic plankton (~¼ mm) up to forms several metres across. Arthropods are characterised by the possession of a segmented body with appendages on each segment. They have a dorsal heart and a ventral nervous system. All arthropods are covered by a hard exoskeleton made of chitin, a polysaccharide which protects against trauma and desiccation. They shed this covering periodically when moulting.

Examples of the five arthropod subphyla
Two fossilised trilobites in a limestone slab.
Trilobitomorpha:
Kainops invius
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Chelicerata:
Eriophora transmarina
A brown centipede with yellow legs and red antennae faces the viewer.
Myriapoda:
Scolopendra cingulata
A small fly with red eyes.
Hexapoda:
Drosophila melanogaster
A stocky crab with large claws.
Crustacea:
Cancer pagurus
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A segmented animal is seen from the side. It has a long antennae and small black eyes; one pair of legs is much more robust than the others; the body is slightly arched and each segment carries a pair of appendages. The whole animal is translucent or a pale brown colour.
Crustaceans are a large group of arthropods, comprising approximately 52,000 described species, and are usually treated as the subphylum Crustacea. They include various familiar animals, such as lobsters, crabs, shrimp, crayfish and barnacles. The majority are aquatic, living in either fresh water or marine environments, but a few groups have adapted to terrestrial life, such as land crabs, terrestrial hermit crabs and woodlice. Most crustaceans are motile, moving about independently, although a few taxa are parasitic and live attached to their hosts (including sea lice, fish lice, whale lice, tongue worms, and Cymothoa exigua, all of which may be referred to as "crustacean lice"), and adult barnacles live a sessile life – they are attached head-first to the substrate and cannot move independently.

The scientific study of crustaceans is known as carcinology. Other names for carcinology are malacostracology, crustaceology and crustalogy, and a scientist who works in carcinology is a carcinologist, crustaceologist or crustalogist.

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Oeneis nevadensis (Insecta: Lepidoptera: Nymphalidae)
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Close-up of the front of a large crab. Its upper surface is purple while the lower surface is white with patches of yellowish hairs.
Cscr-featured.svg Credit: Kevin Cole

The Dungeness crab, Metacarcinus magister (formerly Cancer magister), is a species of crab that inhabits West Coast eelgrass beds and water bottoms from Alaska's Aleutian Islands to Santa Cruz, California.

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† indicates an extinct taxon.

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Template:/box-header Here are some tasks you can do:

  • Start a new article. Arthropods cover an huge range of taxa and other topics, so there will always be plenty of missing articles. Some which have been explicitly requested are listed here.
  • Clean up existing articles. Lists of articles needing cleanup are available either grouped by the work needed or ungrouped.
  • Expand an existing article. Existing articles are often incomplete and missing information on key aspects of the topic. It is particularly important that the most widely read articles be broad in their scope. Wikipedia:WikiProject Arthropods/Popular pages (updated monthly) shows the number of views each article gets, along with assessments of its quality and importance. Articles with higher importance ratings and greater numbers of views are the priority for article improvements, but almost all our articles would benefit from expansion. Stubs can be found in Category:Arthropod stubs and its subcategories.

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Template:/box-header To display subcategories, click on the triangle:

Arthropods
► Arthropod anatomy
► Arthropod morphology
Arthropod stubs

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