Giant crayfish found in Tennessee is new species

[Kadie]

Giant crayfish found in Tennessee is new species


The "bearded" setae on the antennae, bright red highlights and aquamarine tail fins add to the distinctiveness of the new species of crayfish, Barbicambarus simmonsi. REUTERS/Carl Williams/Handout

– 44 mins ago

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – A new species of giant crayfish literally crawled out from under a rock in Tennessee, proving that large new species of animals can be found in highly populated and well-explored places, researchers said on Wednesday.

The new crayfish should not have been easily overlooked, as it is huge -- twice the size of other species, the team at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Eastern Kentucky University said.

But the crustacean is also quite rare, they report in the Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington.

"This isn't a crayfish that someone would have picked up and just said, 'Oh, it's another crayfish,' and put it back," said University of Illinois aquatic biologist Chris Taylor, one of the researchers.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20110120/us_nm/us_crayfish_giant_3


more info...
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/01/110119120548.htm

[Stinky The Clown]

1. East Tennessee . . . . TVA . . . . Oak Ridge

Just sayin' . . . . .

[Shagbark Hickory]

2. Are you suggesting that not unlike the people of TN, the crayfish are also livin large?

[Brother Buzz]

5. Just sayin'

[Shagbark Hickory]

7. MAybe cooking oil from all the fried food is getting into the rivers and streams

or wherever the crayfish live. And it's making them fat.

[Brother Buzz]

14. Maybe it's just the frikkin' fracking

Reminds me of the classic horror movie, The Monster That Challenged the World.

An earthquake has led to the hatching of eggs belonging to a prehistoric mollusk. The hatchlings emerge from the Salton Sea, escape into an underground aquifer, and proceed to terrorize the citizens of California's Imperial Valley. The navy is called in to battle these monsters. Navy Lieutenant Commander John Twillinger (Holt), teams up with several scientists to battle the threat.

[Kalyke]

33. Born and raised and still live in Tennessee - and I don't eat

much fried food.

Stereotypes are for right-wingers.

[Shagbark Hickory]

41. That must make david letterman & jon stewbeef huge rightwingers.

(if you cant tell the difference between reasonable jokes and predjudice.)

[catnhatnh]

15. Think Hors D'oeuvres

or appetizer...not everyone wants lobster as the main course....

[Ghost in the Machine]

28. Geography Fail....

"Later trips to the region confirmed that B. simmonsi was also present in the southern reaches of Shoal Creek, just north of where it drains into the Tennessee River in northwest Alabama."

That would make it Middle Tennessee, around the border of Middle and WEST Tennessee, not EAST Tennessee....

Just sayin'.....

[Erose999]

36. Muscle Shoals, in other words?

[badtoworse]

3. I'll bet they make a great etouffee!

[Scruffy1]

4. Great minds think alike.

[Ian David]

6. Oh, noes!

[Skink]

8. BP size.

[Swamp Rat]

9. Pass the Zatarain's

:9

[KamaAina]

16. Oh yeah chere! Maybe they'll come out with a Giant Economy Size!

and Abita with cases. :beer:

[eShirl]

17. oh yes

[juajen]

24. What would we do down here without our Zatarain's, huh?

[Arugula Latte]

10. I for one welcome our new crustacean overlords!

[flvegan]

11. New species! Kill it and eat it!

I love DU.

[appal_jack]

21. 'bout the best way to conserve a species.

Gotta admit that animals which get domesticated and raised for food out-number most remaining wild macrofauna by a large margin.

Big ponds of giant crayfish sounds like a good type of agriculture to me (if done mindfully in appropriate locations, etc.)

But you're right, we here at DU are a pretty twisted bunch, no matter our dietary preferences.

:)

:hi:

-app

[hfojvt]

27. you might appreciate my post below

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=439&topic_id=232495&mesg_id=233463

[Hell Hath No Fury]

40. My thought too. :(

That this new species is rare I don't have much hope for its longterm survival. You just know there'll be jackasses doing everything they can to get their mitts on these guys for their cooking pot. :cry:

[Gold Metal Flake]

12. That ain't no crayfish...

That's a crawdad! And it looks delish.

[Kalyke]

34. Thank you (other than the carnivorous comment).

But, you're correct, in Tennessee, they are crawdads, not crayfish.

[Gold Metal Flake]

37. Sometimes we called them crawdaddies.

Used to play with them a lot. They grip on a stick, we pick them up, they flip their tails, we put them down, they let go of the stick and shoot away. Repeat. Then we would collect toads.

[CRK7376]

38. Me too

catching crawdaddies in NC. unfortunately our streams here in my neck of NC don't seem to have as many as we used to. As a youngster, one of my greatest pass times was to grab a buddy or two and head down to the creek to build mud dams, throw rocks, catch crawdaddies and salamanders, anything live we could catch including snakes, frogs and fish....Today when I take my kids to the creek, we have to work really hard to find a crawdaddy. Of course some creeks nearby are more populated than the one on our property, but still...it's unfortunate you can't find them as easily as we could 40-45 years ago....

[Gold Metal Flake]

39. LOL! We had similar childhoods 'cept mine was in Houston playing in the drainage ditches & bayous.

The ditches were in the front yards circling the entire neighbohoods and filled with crawdads and toads. Google Earth shows they are all gone now and the larger bayous the ditches drained into are paved. All the nature gone.

[Kalyke]

42. Yup... crawdaddies and the salamanders. Sounds like a

60s rock group.

[WinkyDink]

13. Yeah! New aquatic insect found!

[freethought]

18. I actually had one as a pet.

Not the new species of course. I took it from a family friend, who kept it in stagnant,smelly, unchanged water.
About two weeks later it was living in activated carbon/zeolite(to control ammonia) filtered, PH controlled, temperature controlled, aerated, crystal clear water. It was also transferred to a new 10 gal tank which was probably 3-4 times larger than the little bucket tank it was in. Regular checks were done for PH, ammonia, and chlorine. It even had a little fake hollow log that it spent most of its time in. I even built out of Sculpey, a sort of ramp that led it up to a floating turtle dock that it could hall itself out of the water. Don't ask me why but crayfish will sometimes hall themselves completely out of the water. Oddly enough it made a habit of digging up all of the fake plants that were placed in the tank gravel. I would wake up in the am and find all the fake plants floating on the surface.

This little crayfish lived like this for two years till it finally died of old age.

[juajen]

25. Just wonderin'. Why didn't you use real plants instead of plastic?

Could be why the critter didn't flourish.

[freethought]

32. I don't think it would have made a difference

Crayfish are the freshwater equivalent to lobsters in the ocean and are essentially scavengers, feeding on dead organisms. Also, some research that I did on the species stated that they are not long lived creatures to begin with, hardly ever living beyond 3-4 years even under ideal conditions. The little fellow was already a year plus old when I adopted it. But for the remaining two years, he totally had it made!
I tend to think that when the little fellow uprooted the fake plants was just following an instinct to burrow into bottom sediment and not to actually feed on the plants.

[ldf]

19. pygmy lobster

stunted, genetic mutant lobster.

but prefers to be called "the midgster"...

:shrug:

[slackmaster]

20. Holy Crap! What a wonderful discovery!

:kick:

[snooper2]

22. can it only make left hand turns?

:rofl:

[Odin2005]

23. Cool critter!

[hfojvt]

26. I am reminded of a short story by Howard Fast

http://www.trussel.com/hf/short.htm#T261

The Large Ant

In the story, this guy was in his cabin after playing some golf and looks up and sees a large ant at the foot of his bed. A giant one like 9-12 inches in length. He reacts like almost anybody else would, quickly grabs a golf club and kills it. Then he takes it to the University where the professor shows that this "ant" is actually wearing a tool belt and is, in reality, an alien species from another planet. The professor says this is the fourth one that has been brought to him - all killed. He concludes that as a hive species the ants are not going to understand the hostility they received and will probably respond with deadly force of their own. And since they are an advanced species capable of interstellar travel, they probably will exterminate us.

[Warren DeMontague]

29. I, for one, will welcome our new crawdad overlords.

[MineralMan]

30. After a thorough examination, scientists

cooked the new mudbug species. "It has an excellent flavor, and a meatier tail that the smaller ones. Yom, yom!" they said.

[hobbit709]

31. That's not a giant crayfish

these are
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tasmanian_giant_freshwater_crayfish

[Erose999]

35. Mudbugs! Who's bringin the Frank's Red Hot?