Both men suspected that this was a wayward member of the originally discovered species, Barbicambarus cornutus. B. cornutus had never been seen that far south, but the researchers knew that crayfish have been moved great distances in the bait buckets of itinerant fishermen or by those interested in commercially rearing crayfishes.
"I was leaning to the easiest explanation," Taylor said.
"Me too," said Schuster. "That's been going on for 50 years in the U.S., moving species around, so it would not be a surprise if that was the case."
The researchers contacted a colleague in Tennessee, who told them that a scientist with the Tennessee Valley Authority, Jeffrey Simmons, had collected a crayfish that looked like the one in the photo "just a couple of miles from where the original photograph we had gotten was taken," Schuster said.
That was enough to spur a hastily organized field trip to Shoal Creek.
With two other biologists, Taylor and Schuster scoured the creek for more specimens. After two hours of turning over boulders and kicking up the sediment to flush the crayfish into their seine, the researchers had found nothing out of the ordinary.
"We had worked so hard and long that we were ready to give up and find another site," Schuster said. "And we saw this big flat boulder underneath a bridge and so we said, 'OK. Let's flip this rock, just for the heck of it; this will be our last one.' And sure enough, that's where we got the first specimen." It was a big male, about twice the size of any other crayfish they had seen that day. And it had the characteristic bearded setae.
The researchers found only two specimens that day, a very small haul for nearly three hours of work. The second sp
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| Contact: Diana Yates diya@illinois.edu 217-333-5802 University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Source:Eurekalert |