A family of small marine crustaceans; a biological taxonomic classification for a group of tiny shrimp-like organisms found in ocean ecosystems.
From scientific Latin combining 'aphoru-' (possibly from Greek roots meaning without appendages) and '-idae' (the standard suffix for animal families in taxonomic nomenclature, derived from Latin). Created during the 19th-century explosion of marine biology.
Aphoruridae are so tiny and numerous in the ocean that they're part of the invisible food chain supporting whales and fish, yet we have specific taxonomic names for them—showing how science catalogs life from the cosmic to the microscopic.
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