Smooth fan lobster
Amazing fact
Smooth fan lobster larvae drift through the sea clinging to jellyfish that serve as their food.
沖縄美ら海水族館
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An illustration based on the real animal.
A little discovery to share.
Smooth fan lobster larvae drift through the sea clinging to jellyfish that serve as their food.
THE REAL WORLD
The real Smooth fan lobster
- Scientific name
- Ibacus novemdentatus
- Japanese name
- オオバウチワエビ
- Group
- Ocean animals
- Class
- Malacostraca
- Order
- Decapoda
- Family
- Scyllaridae
- Genus
- Ibacus
It lives in seas south of Suruga Bay, along the San'in coast of Japan, around Hong Kong and on the east coast of Africa.
It looks like the uchiwa-ebi (Japanese fan lobster), but the projections along the edge of its shell are bigger.
How the Smooth fan lobster lives
After repeated molts, they become transparent lobster-shaped larvae and begin living on the seabed. After another molt, they become small lobsters shaped like the adults. Adults live on sandy or sandy-muddy seabeds and usually hide in the sand.
沖縄美ら海水族館Basic data
- Range
- South of Suruga Bay, Sanin coast, Hong Kong, and eastern African coast
Where the Smooth fan lobster has been recorded
Records: GBIF.org (CC0 and CC BY 4.0 records, retrieved 2026-11-07). Map: Natural EarthSee the records on GBIF
Watch wild animals from a distance. Do not touch or feed them, and take care of the places where they live.
Names around the world
- 日本語
- オオバウチワエビ
- 简体中文
- 九齿扇虾
- 繁體中文
- 九齒扇蝦
- 한국어
- 아홉니부채새우
- Português (Brasil)
- Lagosta-sapata-achatada
Names come from Wikidata and iNaturalist records. Where a language has no recorded name, we use the scientific name.
Sources and how we check
- 鳥羽水族館 — オオバウチワエビChecked: 2026-11-04
- 沖縄美ら海水族館 — オオバウチワエビChecked: 2026-11-07
We check each fact against its source. The illustrations simplify how the real animal looks.
The classification (class, order, family, genus) follows Wikidata records, checked against GBIF. Classifications can change as research goes on.
The basic data are the values given in each source. They vary with how the animal is measured, whether it is male or female, and whether it lives in the wild or in captivity.
This page was translated from the original Japanese with the help of AI.
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