Definitions

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

  • noun The free-swimming first stage of the larva of certain crustaceans, having an unsegmented body with three pairs of appendages and a single median eye.

from The Century Dictionary.

  • noun A spurious genus of crustaceans named by O. F. Müller in 1785.
  • noun A stage of development of low crustaceans, as cirripeds and entomostracans, in which the larva has three pairs of legs, a single median eye, and an unsegmented body. Many crustaceans hatch as nauplii. See cuts under Cirripedia.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

  • noun (Zoöl.) A crustacean larva having three pairs of locomotive organs (corresponding to the antennules, antennæ, and mandibles), a median eye, and little or no segmentation of the body.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • noun A crustacean larva having three pairs of locomotive organs (corresponding to the antennules, antennae, and mandibles), a median eye, and little or no segmentation of the body.

Etymologies

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition

[Latin, a kind of shellfish, from Greek nauplios.]

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Examples

  • The eggs hatch into nauplius or metanauplius larvae which undergo several moults before reaching maturity.

    Crustacea 2008

  • The nauplius undergoes five moults before it transforms into a copepodite stage that more closely resembles the adult.

    Crustacea 2008

  • The eggs are carried in the brood pouch until they hatch into either nauplius or metanauplius larvae.

    Crustacea 2008

  • After mating, the eggs undergo brief embryonic development before they are released into the water as nauplius larvae.

    Crustacea 2008

  • Variations in the density proportions of each develop mental stage - nauplius, copepodite, and adult - of T. japonicus, in numbers of individuals per millilitre, are shown in figure 9.

    Chapter 7 1983

  • _Peneus_ with its long direct development gave the best and truest picture of the ancestral history of the Malacostraca, and that accordingly the nauplius and the zoaea larvæ represented important ancestral stages.

    Form and Function A Contribution to the History of Animal Morphology

  • What a nauplius looks like you will see in fig. 8.

    Chatterbox, 1906 Various 1873

  • But I am surprised that such small and weak creatures as are often captured (for instance, the nauplius of a crustacean, and a tardigrade) should be strong enough to act in this manner, seeing that it was difficult to push in one end of a bit of a hair 1/4 of an inch in length.

    Insectivorous Plants Charles Darwin 1845

  • The eggs are carried in the brood pouch until they hatch into either nauplius or metanauplius larvae.

    Featured Articles - Encyclopedia of Earth 2010

  • [15] The nauplius will usually moult six times before it morphs into the next stage.

    CreationWiki - Recent changes [en] 2010

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