Discovering that a shrimp can flick its eyes over to a fish and follow up by tracking it or flicking back to observe something else implies a 'primate-like' awareness of the immediate environment that we do not normally associate with crustaceans. For several reasons, stomatopods (mantis shrimp) do not fit the general mould of their subphylum, and here we add saccadic, acquisitional eye movemen...

The Collection of Decapod and Stomatopod Crustaceans from the Cádiz Oceanographic Centre (CCDE-IEOCD) comprises a number of lithodid crabs from Spanish surveys carried out in African waters. The revision of this material allowed the confirmation of new records of Lithodesferox Filhol, 1885 in Guinea-Bissau and Mauritania, Lithodes mamillifer Macpherson, 1988 in Mozambique, Neolithodes asperrimu...

1. The peculiar structure of the stomatopod eye requires it to make complicated movements. These include slow 'scans', which relate to the animal's colour vision system, as well as faster 'saccades'. 2. The myology of the eyecup is investigated and shown to consist of eight individual muscles which are divided, on kinematic grounds, into six functional groups. 3. These groups form three pairs o...