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The character 蛑 serves as a specialized zoological term for marine crabs, and its occurrence is almost entirely limited to the compound 蝤蛑 (qiúmóu), which means swimming crab. It is a phono-semantic compound: the radical 虫 ('insect') on the left indicates that it belongs to the category of crawling creatures, arthropods, and various invertebrates in classical Chinese taxonomy, while the right-hand component 牟 (móu) provides the pronunciation. The term is used in a highly restricted manner, appearing almost exclusively in classical texts on marine biology and in regional coastal vocabularies that describe different species of edible crustaceans.
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