The proposed planning activities will investigate fundamental questions concerning the energetic strategies utilized during early development of bathyal crabs. Specific questions to be addressed include: 1). what are the contributions of different lipid classes, protein, and carbohydrate toward nutritional requirements during embryonic development of the deep-sea red crab Chaceon quinquedens; and 2). what are the contributions of maternal nutritional history and depth (or temperature) of occurrence to the patterns of yolk utilization in red crab embryos. My preliminary work demonstrates that this species exhibits two different patterns of yolk composition and utilization during embryogenesis. This proposed planning activities are designed to determine the factors responsible for the observed variation and will be used as the basis for a more detailed comparative study on embryonic nutritional flexibility in two species of bathyal crabs, red crab and golden crab C. fenneri, which have different geographic and bathymetric distributions.
