Abstract

The box crab Calappa exanthematosa Alcock and Anderson, (1894)        re-described from the coastal waters of Pakistan. C. exanthematosa was collected as a bycatch during the shrimp trawling. This species previously synonymised under              C. japonica Ortmann, (1892) from the Bay of Bengal, (type locality Japan), since 1937 to till date (Galil, 1997; Spiridinov and Apel, 2007). Ng et al., (2011) re-described and illustrated the C exanthematosa after comparison of freshly collected specimen of Calappa japonica from the Gulf of Oman and India and revealed that the both species have resemblance to each other, but few marked differences exist between both species. Current study re-described the morphological characteristic of C. exanthematosa from the coastal waters of Pakistan.