Florida stone crab

Florida stone crab
Male
Scientific classification
Domain:	Eukaryota
Kingdom:	Animalia
Phylum:	Arthropoda
Class:	Malacostraca
Order:	Decapoda
Suborder:	Pleocyemata
Infraorder:	Brachyura
Family:	Menippidae
Genus:	Menippe
Species:	M. mercenaria
Binomial name
Menippe mercenaria (Say, 1818)

The Florida stone crab (Menippe mercenaria) is a crab found in the western North Atlantic, from Connecticut to Colombia, including Texas, the Gulf of Mexico, Belize, Mexico, Jamaica, Cuba, The Bahamas, and the East Coast of the United States. The crab can also be found in and around the salt marshes of South Carolina and Georgia. It is widely caught for food. The closely related species Menippe adina (gulf stone crab) is sometimes considered a subspecies – they can interbreed, forming hybrids – and they are treated as one species for commercial fishing, with their ranges partly overlapping. The two species are believed to have diverged approximately 3 million years ago.^[1]