- Animals
- ›Arthropods
- ›Crustaceans
- ›Typical Crustaceans
- ›Malacostracans
- ›Decapods, Isopods, and allies
- ›Decapods and Krill

Decapods
Decapoda
A decapod is a crustacean in the large order of Decapoda (from Ancient Greek δέκά déka 'ten' + πούς poús 'foot') within the class Malacostraca, including crabs, lobsters, crayfish, shrimp, and prawns. Most decapods are scavengers. The order is estimated to contain nearly 15,000 extant species in around 2,700 genera, with around 3,300 fossil species. Nearly half of these species are crabs, with the shrimp (about 3,000 species) and Anomura including hermit crabs, king crabs, porcelain crabs, squat lobsters (about 2500 species) making up the bulk of the remainder. The earliest fossils of the group date to the Devonian.
2 branches of this order, most-observed first

Crabs, Lobsters, Shrimps, and Allies
suborderPleocyemata

Penaeid and sergestid shrimps
suborderDendrobranchiata
Where it lives
Recorded sightings
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geo-referenced records in GBIF, from museums, herbaria and field observers.
Drag the globe to turn it. Dots are where records exist, not a range map; darker means more records.
In the stacks
Searching the stacks…
Every page naming Decapoda in the Biodiversity Heritage Library →
This page is assembled live from iNaturalist, GBIF, Wikipedia, the Source Library and the Internet Archive. It is not yet part of the hand-edited codex. iNaturalist taxon 47186.