Stable spot constellations preserve crayfish identity through molting

23,813 carapace images of red swamp crayfish (Procambarus clarkii) are paired with an equal number of spot-coordinate annotation files. The dataset, created by Zhang, Cheng-long and hosted on Harvard Dataverse, includes longitudinal cross-time samples, full-sibling samples, and a real-image subset for non-temporal evaluation. It was last updated on May 20, 2026.

Use Cases

• Individual verification and retrieval based on unique carapace spot constellations.
• Longitudinal re-identification of crayfish across molting events using cross-time samples.
• Analysis of spot pattern heritability or variation using the included full-sibling samples.
• Benchmarking non-temporal image recognition models using the real-image subset.

Strengths

• Contains 23,813 annotated image-annotation pairs, providing a substantial corpus for analysis.
• Includes longitudinal cross-time samples, enabling study of identity persistence through molting.
• Provides full-sibling samples, which may support research on genetic or developmental pattern influences.

Limitations

• Images were recompressed at reduced JPEG quality to decrease file size, which may affect fine-grained visual analysis.
• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.
• The dataset's geographic and temporal coverage is not specified, which may limit understanding of its representativeness.

Provenance

Source

Harvard Dataverse

Collection Method

Images preserve their original pixel dimensions but were recompressed; annotation files were copied without modification.

Time Range

The description mentions 'longitudinal cross-time samples', but specific dates are not provided.

Freshness

Last updated 2026-05-20 00:26:37; freshness should be verified.

Geography

Geographic coverage is not specified in the provided description.