A Preliminary Report on Brachyuran Crabs (Crustacea: Decapoda: Brachyura) from Mangroves of Odisha

Abstract

Crabs are one of the conspicuous faunal components of mangrove ecosystems. They play important roles in trapping energy, accelerating litter decomposition, nutrient cycling, aeration of sediment, substrate topography modification and grain size distribution. They also influence the composition, density and distribution of mangrove vegetation through seed and seedling predation. Although a good deal of information is available on mangrove inhabiting crabs from various states of India, viz., West Bengal, Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, Kerala, Goa, Maharashtra and Andaman and Nicobar Islands (Dev Roy, 2008), there is hardly any information from Odisha mangroves barring a single publication by Chadha and Kar (1999). In the aforesaid work, only 5 species of crabs were recorded. This paucity of information has necessitated to undertake this work.