Palapedia nitida

(Stimpson, 1858)

The carapace of this species is much narrower than that of Palapedia integra, the dorsal surface is glabrous to the naked eye and is extremely convex from side to side. The front is deeply separated into two lobes, which are again subdivided into two lobes by a shallow sinus; the preorbital tooth is well defined and is not fused with the frontal lobe as in integra. The lateral borders are spiny, three or four of the spines being of moderate size; an indentation near the anterior third of these borders is rather deep but one or two shallow indentations occur behind it. The arm has a spine near the superior border of the upper border; the wrist has also a spinule near the distal end; fingers are not hollowed at tip as in integra.
In my specimen, the two frontal lobes are again more deeply bilobate than in Stimpson's figure, (in the text of Stimpson's paper, they are also described as bilobate). I think it probable that the difference is due only to individual variation. (T. Sakai, 1939: 430)

Type locality: Kagoshima Bay, Japan.
Range: Amirante Islands (Rathbun, 1911); Persian Gulf - Bahrain (Stephensen, 1945); Maldives - Nallandu (Rathbun, 1902b); India - Ganjam coast (Alcock, 1899a); Andaman Islands (Alcock, 1899a); Japan - Kagoshima Bay (Stimpson, 1858a, 1907), Shimoda (Sakai, 1935, 1939), Sagami Bay (Sakai, 1965b), Sagami Bay, Izu Peninsula, Kagoshima Bay and Nagasaki (Sakai, 1976a); China - northern China Sea (Stimpson, 1907), Fujian (Dai & Yang, 1991); Australia - Thursday Island.

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