Staff

1. Pessani Daniela (Coordinator)
2. Battuello Marco (Staff)
3. (Staff)
4. Mussat Sartor Rocco (Staff)
5. Nicola Nurra (Staff)

Contacts

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Activity

Marine Crustaceans are the most numerous and diversified Arthropods. The morphology and body size, extremely various and suitable to occupy the most different environments, the trophic strategies, the reproductive strategies, the behaviour, connected to the disputes relevant to taxonomy and phylogeny, render them a research subject undoubtedly interesting. The research team attends to three subjects, connected to biodiversity:

1) Holoplanktonic Copepods play a fundamental role in marine trophic chain, being the main herbivores and preys for carnivorous planktonta. Though the group systematic is wellknown, many problems still remain relevant to biodiversity in Mediterranean waters, especially in open sea.

2) Many Decapods species live steadily or preferably associated to Posidonia oceanica, developing dimensional, alimentary, and difensive adaptations in coherence with the plant; still little investigated is the specific composition of the group in the Posidonia ecosystem.

3) Crustacean Decapods larvae spend a long period as planktonic organisms, represented by numerous developmental 
stages, before passing to parental environment. The description and specific identification of these larvae is one of the major problems in the study of the group. So far, only 40 - 50 % of the full larval development of the Mediterranean Decapods species is known in detail.