ABSTRACT
After the larval stage, the rst year of life is probably the most critical period for king crabs. In concert with larval survival, settlement success and postlarval survival probably contribute most to success of year-classes and subsequent recruitment. Much of our knowledge about the early life history of king crabs has been acquired during shery investigations or studies in wild habitats. The rst portion of this chapter reviews those studies for three of the major king crab species, the red king crab (RKC) Paralithodes camtschaticus, blue king crab (BKC) P. platypus, and golden king crab (GKC) Lithodes aequispinus; information on L. santolla and other southern hemisphere king crabs is presented by Lovrich and Tapella in Chapter 14. In recent years, development of aquaculture techniques for king crabs (Chapter 13) has allowed the study in experimental conditions of larval settlement and habitat selection, their environmental preferences, and feeding behavior. The second half of the chapter examines experimental research on habitat preferences and ontogenetic changes in behavior. Growth of juvenile king crabs has been studied using crabs collected from the wild (Weber, 1967; Donaldson et al., 1992) as well as crabs hatched and raised in the laboratory (Stoner et al., 2010, 2013). The subjects of king crab growth and feeding are treated in detail by Stevens and Jewett in Chapter 11, so are not presented in detail in this chapter.
