A member of the order Cumacea; a small shrimp-like crustacean with a thin, elongated body that lives primarily in ocean sediments.
From Cumacea (the order name) plus the suffix -an (forming nouns and adjectives referring to members of a group). The word emerges from modern zoological classification of marine creatures.
Cumaceans spend their lives buried in ocean mud and sand, which is why we rarely see them, but if you scoop up a handful of ocean sediment from deep water, thousands of cumaceans are probably in that handful—they're invisible to us but fundamental to deep-sea ecosystems.
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