﻿OBSERVATIONS ON THE HABITS OF THE CRUSTACEAN 

 EMERITA ANALOGA 



By FRANK WALTER WEYMOUTH 



AND 



CHARLES HOWARD RICHARDSON, Jr. 

 of leland stanford junior university 



(With One Plate) 



During June and July, while attending the 1910 session of the 

 Marine Biological Laboratory of Stanford University at Pacific 

 Grove, California, the writers had an opportunity of observing cer- 

 tain phases of the life history of Emerita, which, as they do not appear 

 to have been mentioned in literature, seem worthy of recording, par- 

 ticularly as they furnish some extremely fine examples of the correla- 

 tion of structure and habits. Garstang, in several admirable papers 

 pointing out the close correlation in various Crustacea between struc- 

 tures not commonly considered useful and the habits of the animals 

 possessing them, very justly claims that while morphology and em- 

 bryology have received a vast amount of attention, " bionomics " has 

 been neglected and as a result the significance of many structures is 

 entirely missed, while even their morphology is often incorrectly 

 interpreted because their function is ignored or merely inferred from 

 their form. 



The aphorism of Jeffries Wyman : " The isolated study of any- 

 thing in Natural History is a fruitful source of error ", is strikingly 

 illustrated in the morphological views that have been advanced for the 

 significance of some of the structures in Emerita, as well as the 

 numerous cases cited by Garstang. It seems curious that so many 

 investigators shrink from the often trivial expenditure of time and 

 energy involved in the experimental method of checking and com- 

 pleting their morphological work, when this almost invariably brings 

 such a large return. It is as a slight contribution toward interpreting 

 some of the well-known features of Emerita, that the following ob- 

 servations are offered. 



The genus Emerita — the better known name Hippa has been trans- 

 ferred to Remipes — is represented on the Pacific Coast of North 

 America by two species of wide distribution. One, Emerita emerita 



Smithsonian Miscellaneous Collections, Vol. 59, No. 7. 



