ericrlarson.bsky.social
Associate professor in freshwater ecology, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Crayfish, invasive species, environmental DNA, and more. https://publish.illinois.edu/erlarson/
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Hard to say - the invasive crayfish has some temperature limits that shouldn't let them overlap much with trout water, but they do unpredictable things in a new place.
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Well, there has been a lot of spread of an invasive crayfish from eastern North America in the Upper Snake; an open access note here (www.reabic.net/journals/bir...) and a second paper here (doi.org/10.3955/046....). They've been associated with damage to irrigation canals from burrowing, as well.
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That spring was full of the rare, native Snake River pilose crayfish, Pacifastacus connectens, when we sampled it in 2017 (peerj.com/articles/5668/). Folks had crayfish traps out below the falls. One of the more abundant populations we found of the species.
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I know that one - an unexpectedly magical place out among the dairies and center-pivot irrigation
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Looks like the guide also lists them in Pachena? I don't know how you get to Vancouver Island as a crayfish post-glaciation without human help, but those around Black Lake are at least a little different than the classic, invasive signals that occur globally.
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Interested to see the crayfish records here. I think signal crayfish are non-native to Vancouver Island, but we found an interesting Olympic & Chehalis lineage in the Black Lake tributary stream in ~2010 (hctf.ca/wp-content/u...). Have been curious to know how widespread they are around Bamfield.
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Ah, that's great - we never found each other again before I left.
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I love Illinois' commitment to extremely common state symbols. Flower? The violets that grow in your yard as weeds. Fish? Bluegill, dummy - it's the first fish you caught as a kid. Keep it simple.
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Thanks, Miguel - there's work remaining within Pacifastacus, as well. I'd like to better define the P. leniusculus subspecies by genetics, morphology, and geography. Those Astacidae and Cambaridae distributions of course remain a big puzzle and a bit outside my aptitude.
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For me, it's crayfish for science and crawfish for food, but you get some predictable, regional variation on the name. I grew up in Wyoming referring to the critters I caught in irrigation ditches as crawdads, solidly in the green patch of this map.
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I mean, it's hard to compete with the Crawzilla Crawdad (Lacunicambarus chimera) or the Rusty Gravedigger (Lacunicambarus miltus).
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And those are described as the Misfortunate and Okanagan crayfishes here (doi.org/10.11646/zoo...). But this work started as a small, $5k NSF investment (+$5k match from Japan) that resulted in five papers between myself and Dr. Nisikawa Usio over nearly twenty years. #WithoutNSF #SaveNSF
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How many species? Our more enthusiastic phylogenetic species delimitation algorithms, based on molecular data, would suggest 17 (!). That's a little ambitious for my tastes, but two lineages stood out as highly distinct from the classic, globally invasive Signal Crayfish (peerj.com/articles/1915/)
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So I did. And it turned out there were a lot of funky "Signal Crayfish" throughout the Pacific Northwest (doi.org/10.1111/j.13...). This wasn't necessarily news; the species had a complex taxonomic history, and morphology and geography would both indicate multiple species.
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Usio had collected from Washington State the summer before my EAPSI fellowship for his genetics work (doi.org/10.1002/ece3...). At the start of our collaboration, he told me: "I found some Pacifastacus crayfish in Washington State that aren't Signal Crayfish. You should look for them."
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EAPSI was ideal for comparisons of species between their native and non-natives ranges. While I was comparing diets of Signal Crayfish between lakes in Hokkaido and Washington (doi.org/10.1890/ES10...), Usio was studying origins and spread of the species throughout Japan.
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I was funded to work with Dr. Nisikawa Usio on invasive Signal Crayfish, native to the Pacific Northwest of North America but widely invasive across northern Japan, where it displaced the endemic crayfish and reduced aquatic plants in wetlands like the Kushiro Marsh.
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The crayfish in this genus (Pacifastacus) are big and can be good to harvest, but both of these species are rare enough that you'd struggle to scrape together a meal.
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A mix of place name and circumstance: this species occurs in the Malheur region of Oregon (a lake, river, national forest, etc), and malheur means "misfortune" in French. The Misfortunate Crayfish was also discovered studying spread of invasive Rusty Crayfish, which has widely displaced it.
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Not just any waterfall - the tallest on the planet
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Yeah, they'll live in the burrow for most of the year, but travel overland to surface water for reproduction or to release young. You can find burrowers walking overland on humid days in the spring. Something in Lacunicambarus wouldn't be surprising for Indiana: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lacunic...
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It's a burrowing crayfish chimney
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I was walking into the pedestrian underpass to the Museum Campus when someone in the stream of people coming out told me it was canceled. Trying again in August; here's hoping.
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We don't promote these successes enough - that the Clean Water Act, for example, massively reversed trends in fish population declines in our most polluted rivers (doi.org/10.1093/bios...).
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Colleagues, including my partner, with years of service at the agency. Some Permanent POs reclassified as Probationary. Exceptional scientists who were former professors at major institutions, and came to NSF to serve the community and ensure science thrives in the US.
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My best was a receipt rejected b/c I couldn't purchase food for other people (like a picnic or BBQ). I use beef liver to trap for crayfish, & the receipt was for two cases of beef liver only (w/justification in the PCard form). But I do like the idea of hosting a big meal of only beef liver - enjoy!