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Crab Cycle

When Joanna Gyory, an MIT-WHOI Joint Program student, visited the Liquid Jungle Lab in Panama, one rainfall determined her thesis project. Just days after the year’s first rain, thousands of colorful crabs boiled out of forest burrows, and raced for the sea to reproduce. Gyory found that the crabs were common, but no one knew their life cycle. Fascinated, she sampled the bay, reared the larvae, and elucidated most of the hard-to-culture animal’s life stages and development times—a step toward understanding the species and the region’s ecology.(Courtesy of Joanna Gyory, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution)