UCSB undergraduates have discovered a new crab egg predator—a tiny crustacean called a nicothoid copepod—in a finding that has major implications for local crab fisheries 🦀 The discovery began in a routine lab instruction in the class of parasitologist Armand Kuris (of msi_ucsb) and led to a highly regarded paper in one of the field’s preeminent journals. "It gave me experiences that I wouldn’t have at that point that I could take into grad school,” said Sophia Lecuona Manos, who completed a master’s degree at UCSB’s Bren School of Environmental Science & Management. During two years of crab collecting from local waters, thanks to help from local fishers, the students uncovered an organism that could spend its entire life on the broods of female crabs that hold their eggs outside their bodies. "This matters ecologically because unlike a parasite that might weaken its host gradually, an egg predator strikes at the next generation directly," said undergraduate Jaden Orli, the paper’...