The shell-breaking behavior of the crabs 0:iu.y verrec~uxri Saussure 1853 and Eriphia .squtmwta. Stimpson 1859 from the Bay of Panama is described. The master claws of both these crabs are well designed for breaking shells. Small shells, relative to the size of a crab predator, are crushed by progressively breaking off larger segments of a shell’s apex, while larger shells are peeled by inserti...

Spatial patterns of species body size across major environmental gradients are being quantified for terrestrial organisms, but similar efforts are largely lacking for marine invertebrates. Bathymetry represents a major environmental gradient in the oceans, and existing theoretical models predict that species body size should decrease with increasing depth, especially for deep-sea species. Previ...

This paper presents the investigation results of methylmercury and total mercury in gastropod and bivalve species collected from eight coastal sites along the Chinese Bohai Sea. The total mercury was directly determined by atomic fluorescence spectrometry (AFS), while the methylmercury was measured by a laboratory established high performance liquid chromatography-atomic fluorescence spectromet...

Viewed under UV light the diverse and exceptionally well-preserved molluscs from the Late Jurassic Cordebugle Konservat Lagerstätte (Calvados, Normandy, France) reveal fluorescent fossil shell colour patterns predating the oldest previously known instance of such patterns by 100 Myr. Evidently, residual colour patterns are observable in Mesozoic molluscs by application of this non-destructive m...

Bivalves and gastropods are the two largest classes of extant molluscs. Despite sharing a huge number of features, they do not share a key ecological one: gastropods are essentially epibenthic, while most bivalves are infaunal. However, this is not the ancestral bivalve condition; Cambrian forms were surface crawlers and only during the Ordovician a fundamental infaunalization process took plac...