00:00:04
Speaker 1: Welcome to Backwoods University, a place where we focus on wildlife, wild places and the people who dedicate their lives to conserving both. Big shout out to aex Hunt for their support of this podcast. I’m your host, Lake Pickle, and today, well fire up the boiler, cut up some onions, garlic and sausage, because it’s time for a crawfish boil. Well not, actually, I wish it was, but it is time for all of us to learn a little bit more about the most popular crustacean that has ever graced the North American fresh waters. And believe me, I bet you’ll be surprised at how much there is to learn about these critters. Let’s get into it. I can picture the whole thing in my head right now. It’s early April. I pull into my parents’ driveway, and the second I open truck door, I am welcomed by the familiar smell of boiling crawfish, the Cajun seasoning, the diced onions and garlic, the chopped sausage, and of course the crawfish, all intermingling together in a giant pot of boiling water to make a harmony of good aroma and an even better taste. If you have never had the privilege of attending a crawfish boil, you are seriously missing out. It’s a social event just as much as it is a feast, and it’s been a staple of American Southern culture for a very long time. I would even wager to say that you won’t find anyone down here that doesn’t at least know what a crawfish is. But that is where most of our knowledge ends, myself included before I did this episode. Crawfish, the small and delicious fresh watershellfish that has brought more people together than Woodstock ever did. Look what else do we know about them? Where did they come from? How did they get here? How many of these things are there? My friends, There’s a much bigger and interesting story here, more so than I even anticipated, And I think you’re really gonna like it, so let’s jump into it.
00:02:16
Speaker 2: And then we’ve got these Basically, these are you know, yabby pumps.
00:02:19
Speaker 1: It’s early June and I’ve just met up with Calvin Razak for a day spin a field digging up crawfish. Calvin is an ichthyologist, which in the most basic terms means he’s a fish scientist that specializes in crayfish and he works for the Mississippi Museum of Natural Science.
00:02:36
Speaker 3: I would say this is probably the last week I would do a burrowing crayfish ever.
00:02:40
Speaker 4: Why it gets dry?
00:02:42
Speaker 1: Man?
00:02:42
Speaker 4: Oh okay, And these things are six to.
00:02:44
Speaker 3: Eight feet deep from sometimes, like we’re probably only gonna get them if if they’ve.
00:02:53
Speaker 4: Just started a new borough, or if we’ve just pissed him off enough for them to come up.
00:02:58
Speaker 1: Okay, Calvin is explaining to me the methods that will be trying to dig up these burrowing crayfish or crawfish. I’m pretty sure the terms are interchangeable.
00:03:07
Speaker 3: Okay, So that that’s this One species is called the Jackson Prairie crayfish Jackson Prairie crayfish yep. And so the Jackson Prairie crayfish is named after this region.
00:03:18
Speaker 4: This is called the Jackson Prairie.
00:03:20
Speaker 1: I didn’t know that.
00:03:20
Speaker 4: Yeah, okay, I didn’t know that part.
00:03:22
Speaker 3: I didn’t know, Missippy Steer, right, yeah, okay, so yeah, you know a lot about the region, so sure.
00:03:27
Speaker 4: So yeah, it’s.
00:03:29
Speaker 3: Only it’s this type of crayfish that lives in these prairie habitats or these remnant prairie habitats, remnant prairies. Yeah, and there’s we got like sixty eight species of crayfish.
00:03:42
Speaker 1: Okay, sorry to interrupt again so soon, but we’ve just found fun facts. Number one, there are almost seventy different species of crawfish just in Mississippi alone, Mississippi flatwoods crayfish, Jackson prairie crayfish, camp Shelby burrowing crayfish, banded mudbug, lonesome grave digger, war paint mudbug. These are all different species that also have some pretty cool names.
00:04:05
Speaker 4: Cool huh.
00:04:09
Speaker 1: See. That’s the other thing that I didn’t know. Like I knew that there was probably the same as most people. Like I knew there’s crawfish that goes into boil. Yeah, and then beyond that, like I would know when I was a kid at like Shiloh Park playing baseball. Yeah, ur in between practice, we would go to the ditches and try to find crawfish, and I just knew some of those crawfish looked a lot different than one ended up in a crawfish bowl. And I didn’t know. I was just a guy that looked different. That’s about as far as my knowledge went. And that bass itedem sometimes.
00:04:39
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, that’s about it.
00:04:42
Speaker 1: But I didn’t know there was sixty eight different species.
00:04:44
Speaker 2: Yeah, no, I had no clue either.
00:04:47
Speaker 3: And you know, you know, fish and muscles and these aquatic organisms are really diverse, like in Mississippi, we’ve got a lot of them.
00:04:54
Speaker 1: Yeah.
00:04:56
Speaker 2: Yeah, I might get some hate if I say crawfish or crayfish.
00:04:58
Speaker 1: You know, I never knew.
00:05:01
Speaker 3: Yeah, so yeah, I kind of used to use them interchangeably. But I mean, if you’re talking about them in a science term, like if you’re writing them down and it’s supposed to be cray fish.
00:05:09
Speaker 1: Yeah, where did crawfish even come from? You know?
00:05:12
Speaker 3: So cajun’s well it’s a French Yeah, well basic kind of it’s a French Well yeah, basically it’s it’s.
00:05:19
Speaker 2: Like cravise is like the French word for it, cravise.
00:05:24
Speaker 3: And if you can imagine, you know, if you if you’re just mixing that up cravis, crayfish.
00:05:31
Speaker 2: Crawfish, Yeah, that’s kind of how it evolved.
00:05:34
Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah, I mean, no one comes a crayfish bowl, right right. Personally, if someone ever invited me to a crayfish bowl, I think I would pass on it. Taking that poor use in terminology, to be an indicator of their cooking capabilities.
00:05:48
Speaker 3: But anyway, I can show you I brought in case we don’t get how much of crayfish I brought.
00:05:56
Speaker 1: I watched Calvin open the back door of his truck and begin digging around in the back seat, and he emerged with the plastic tackle box one that you would take fishing, except this one you didn’t have crank baits, jigs or artificial crawfish lures. He had actual crawfish, like live ones swimming around in there I brought.
00:06:15
Speaker 3: Yeah, so, uh yeah, these are these are from our survey we did up in North Mississippi. But that’s that’s a lacuna cambarrass These are generally, you know, in more Layman’s terms, a mudbug.
00:06:31
Speaker 4: Is that what we call these.
00:06:32
Speaker 1: He looks like he’d go on a ball. Yeah.
00:06:34
Speaker 3: Yeah, I’ve actually heard people eating these guys and they just they taste muddy.
00:06:39
Speaker 4: But I mean maybe they didn’t.
00:06:41
Speaker 2: Purge him, right, but you get the claws on that guy.
00:06:43
Speaker 4: Oh my gosh, man, that these guys.
00:06:45
Speaker 3: So it is called this one’s called the war paint mud bug because it’s so fearsome and it’s got some real I mean, this is good.
00:06:52
Speaker 2: This would hurt if it if it gets me, ye, gets the hold of me.
00:06:55
Speaker 1: But something to be said about the confidence of a crawfish, you know. Yeah, it’s like looking at you and he’s like, I got this.
00:07:06
Speaker 3: Well, if you’re a crawfish, you know, Uh, everything eats a crawfish, right, You’ve got to have these big clauses to defend yourself if you got any chance.
00:07:16
Speaker 4: Like bass love crawfish, right right.
00:07:19
Speaker 3: Uh, there’s a lot of studies out there, owls, hawks.
00:07:25
Speaker 2: Different snake species, amphibians like the.
00:07:27
Speaker 3: Hell bender, yeah, otters, mink, cross I mean, there’s like hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of things animals that live in the in the water or or adjacent to the water that just eat them. And it’s like, uh, like ibises, Yeah, their diet is crawfish and they’re probably eating the ones that are these burrowing ones that come up seasonally after a rain event.
00:07:52
Speaker 2: They might live in pools and then they kind of go back down. But yeah, this.
00:07:56
Speaker 1: Is there any telling like a crawfish that size. Is there any way to tell how old a crawfish that is crawfish like that is?
00:08:04
Speaker 4: Yeah, that’s great, that’s a great question.
00:08:07
Speaker 3: Yeah, crawfish, we are. It’s such a new field that there’s questions like that that we don’t even really know the answer to. We think something like this is like a three or four year old crawfish. But there’s there’s cave crawfish that can live twenty five thirty years. There’s some crayfish that just live a year. Yeah, And so it would not surprise me that if we, you know, developed the proper tools to actually.
00:08:38
Speaker 2: Start studying these guys, that we would figure out that these guys lived a little bit longer than three to four years, because I mean these les live.
00:08:44
Speaker 3: Underground and uh, I mean they don’t move very much.
00:08:49
Speaker 2: Yeah, and they stay in their tunnels underground year round.
00:08:53
Speaker 1: I would guess if they’re underground, can’t nothing really get to them.
00:08:56
Speaker 3: Oh, it’s a perfect defense, right, Yeah. I think that’s why they a lot of he’s adapted to start digging underground because it’s in a stream environment. You’re a perfect prey, right for a lot of things. But if you live underground, then nothing can get you.
00:09:12
Speaker 1: So what have we learned so far? Well, a couple of things. Number One, humans aren’t the only ones that love to eat crawlfish. A whole lot of other things do too, owls, hawks, raccoons, ibis, just to name a few. Number two, there’s some crawfish that can live up to twenty five years. That is insane. Number three and I’m speculating here, but from what I can tell from Calvin, it seems like there’s a whole lot left to learn about these tiny animals.
00:09:42
Speaker 4: Anyway, let’s continue.
00:09:44
Speaker 2: Yeah, okay, we got a few more here too. I mean, looks, you know that.
00:09:50
Speaker 3: I don’t have like a great example of a normal looking for fish we got. I got the kanov our cream. He’s a little messed up. He probably looked at vernal crayfish.
00:09:57
Speaker 2: Look probably something like this.
00:09:59
Speaker 4: He’s got his claw. I was all busted. It happens, man, Yeah, he’s lost the claub again.
00:10:03
Speaker 3: See he’s he’s starting to grow, starting to grow that back, a little grown back.
00:10:07
Speaker 4: Yeah.
00:10:08
Speaker 3: Yeah, right there, that’s got a little mini that’s a little mini claw.
00:10:11
Speaker 4: Give it enough time, they’ll grow it back.
00:10:12
Speaker 1: Yeah, no idea.
00:10:14
Speaker 3: Yeah, when they grow it back, it doesn’t When they grow the clauset back, it doesn’t always come back the same shape or size. Basically, they’re trying to grow grow it back as quickly as possible, because if if you’re a crayfish.
00:10:25
Speaker 4: Everything needs to you got to defend.
00:10:27
Speaker 3: Yeah, and this guy’s got a really bad clauset. Yeah, you’re lucky you’re in aquarium. Yeah, this is another Lacuni Canberra.
00:10:36
Speaker 2: So another mudbug species, Yeah, called the painted hand. We found.
00:10:40
Speaker 4: This one is new. We’ve got a couple of species that we so we’re.
00:10:44
Speaker 3: Still growing our knowledge on on crawfish and where they occur, and so up until a couple of months ago, we did not know a couple of these species occurred in Mississippi.
00:10:54
Speaker 1: Really, Yeah, how crazy is that? I don’t know about y’all, But personally I tend to think, or at least hope that we have a pretty decent grasp on species taxonomy within our states, especially in freshwater aquatic species. But here we are, in twenty twenty six, still finding new species of crawfish that occur in the state of Mississippi, and frankly, I find it fascinating, so that, I mean, that’s cool to me entirely. Again, it’s like you would think, at twenty twenty six, we’ve got to get handle on all this stuff. But it’s honestly, it’s pretty cool. You’re still finding new stuff.
00:11:25
Speaker 4: Yeah, we uh crayfish.
00:11:28
Speaker 2: I think crayfish have been neglected as like a.
00:11:34
Speaker 3: You know, as an organism as a whole for their importance, and it hasn’t really been since two thousand and five, maybe the late nineties that we’ve really started to like, oh, we should look at these things and where are where do they care and how they how they are important to the ek system.
00:11:47
Speaker 2: These two species here, the pin and.
00:11:50
Speaker 3: Hand mudbug and the hatchet burrowing crayfish are our two newest species to the.
00:11:56
Speaker 2: State of Mississippi.
00:11:57
Speaker 3: We knew they were in Tennessee, but we went up to North Tennessee or on the counties that that border Tennessee Alabama and we found these two guys.
00:12:06
Speaker 4: So that’s cool.
00:12:07
Speaker 3: Yeah, so we’re still growing our knowledge and uh, this is an undescribed species right here. I’ve got a colleague who works on trying to look at the genetics of crayfish.
00:12:18
Speaker 4: Yeah, and see if they’re see if.
00:12:21
Speaker 2: They’re they’re different. And so that one is doesn’t have a name.
00:12:24
Speaker 4: Ut yet m yeah and unnamed.
00:12:26
Speaker 1: Okay, not only are we discovering new species occurring in the state. But now I’m currently looking at a quote new species that Calvin has in his crawfish tackle box that is yet to be even described. Boy, I tell you, when I drove out to meet Calvin today, I planned on learning a little bit more about crawfish and getting to play around in the mud a bit. I had no idea I would be getting to see all this new science and even newly discovered species. That’s the thing about wildlife, man, there’s always something new and enter around the next corner.
00:13:01
Speaker 2: No, No, that’s cool.
00:13:03
Speaker 3: Yeah, it is really cool. That’s that’s what kind of drew me to this field, is.
00:13:07
Speaker 1: There’s just so much we don’t know.
00:13:09
Speaker 3: Oh man, there’s the questions you’ve been asking that I don’t have answers for, and where these things occur. That’s what’s what’s so cool, is uh yea, there’s a lot to be discovered here.
00:13:20
Speaker 2: Yeah.
00:13:21
Speaker 5: Some of them even have bad raps too. I’ve we just did a recent project doing morphological comparisons of a sub genus of crayfishes up in the north eastern part of the state, and they whenever they were discovered in nineteen thirty six by a guy, it was all to see just how to kill them, because they were all viewed as crop pests because they burrowed down like from how they would described like ten feet yeah, and then they would all come up when these big rain events and just like just walk through all these big fields agfields, and they were all considered agricultural us. But now we’re finding out that there’s a lot of probable cryptodiversity within those groups through some of the morphological comparisons and stuff. But there’s a lot of genetic work that needs to be done.
00:14:10
Speaker 4: To just kind of see the fascinating.
00:14:12
Speaker 1: As I listened to Calvin and as technician talk about newly discovered species, questions about the animal that still have yet to be answered, and some of the studies that have been done strictly on more of a pest control mindset. This might sound to touch out landish, but I’m honestly reminded of the episode we did a while back on the Gulf when we learned about how much we still don’t know about that area, and what studies have been done have been focused on what we can gain or extract. Again, obviously, I’m for sustainable use of natural resources, and lord knows, I love a crawfish bowl. But I just think that there’s a lot more that this species has to offer, and there’s definitely a lot more that we don’t know. It’s this is the thing that keeps coming up and coming up with this show specifically. It’s like we talked and we figured this out early on. It’s like you can’t appreciate some thing that you don’t understand, right, So, like you don’t understand crawfish, right, apparently is there’s a lot left to be understood. Then you can just back out. Those things are pests, right or yeah, they’re just things that make a.
00:15:14
Speaker 3: Or this is one this is a brown bug, and they’re everywhere and there’s one species, right. I think that’s such a misnomer as everyone thinks that there’s just one one crawfish, right.
00:15:23
Speaker 1: Yeah, but crawfish is crawfish.
00:15:25
Speaker 2: But they look so different, right.
00:15:26
Speaker 3: You can go to a ditch and you’re like, oh, that looks real, that looks real different. But the knowledge isn’t out there that you know, We’ve got so many different kinds.
00:15:38
Speaker 1: I tell you, just in these few minutes of discussion or so, my curiosity for the humble small crayfish or crawfish or whichever one you want to call it, has done nothing but grow all these unknown facts, all these numerous species. And I think it’s time for myself and these two gentlemen to do what we came to do and see if we can dig up some crawfish from out of this small prairie remnant that we are currently in. Let me give a quick rundown on some general crawfish history, if you will, before we go and get our hands in the mud, so we can all have just a little more context. Crawfish freshwater crustaceans that trace their ancestry back to marine lobster like animals from all the way back in the Palaeozoic era. Think about the Southern dinosaur episode that we did kind of in that deep time frame, is what we’re talking The transition from saltwater to freshwater happened multiple independent times, which is why the crawfish that you would find in your average Mississippi ditch and the ones that you would find in a creek in Australia are actually descended from completely separate lineages. North American crawlfish fossils go back roughly one hundred and sixty five to two hundred million years, putting them on this continent well before the first humans ever set foot here. Every crawfish native to North America east of the continental Divide belongs to a single family, Camberra day, and that family has exploded in diversity across the southeast. North America is home to roughly four hundred crawfish species, more than any other continent on Earth, and the epicenter of that diversity is right here in the Southeast. States like Tennessee, Alabama. Here at home in Mississippi consistently rank among the most crawfish rich places on the planet, and this probably has a lot to do with why we’re so infamous for crawfish bulls shout out Louisiana. Ecologically, crawfish punch way above their weight. They’re omnivores, eating algae, aquatic insects, small fish, and just about anything else they can get their claws on that’ll work for them. That makes them a critical link in aquatic food webs, both as consumers and as prey. River otters, herons, bats, raccoons, mink, they all depend heavily on crawfish. Many species of crawfish are also primary burrowers, which is what we’re going to try to dig up later today. Meaning they spend most of their lives underground, which makes them important for soul erration and water infiltration, even in upland habitats far from permanent water. Okay, that’s all the context we need. Let’s dig in the mud. You want to go, Yes, I want to go dig up a crawfish. Can’t say I’ve ever done that. I have, but not the way we’re about to do it.
00:18:19
Speaker 3: Yeah.
00:18:20
Speaker 1: Yeah, the way I did it when I was twelve was a lot more. Uh, I don’t know, not as advanced as what we’re about to do.
00:18:26
Speaker 2: Trust me, I still do that stuff all the time. And yeah, so if he’s a knife.
00:18:33
Speaker 1: We grabbed all of our gear, a large soul knife, a hand powered water pump that closely resembles the type of pump you would use to fill a bicycle tire, and large containers of water, and we head downhill towards the large number of crawfish burrows that are scattered out across the grassy area in close relation to a large creek. However, the first spot that we stop at, I was kind of surprised at how far we were from the visible water No, is it surprising it’d be that far from the creek.
00:19:00
Speaker 4: Depends on where the water table lives. Okay, it’s surprising.
00:19:05
Speaker 2: I’ve studied this this species. I studied this species last.
00:19:08
Speaker 3: Year, yea, and we learned that the look up for we are away from the creek, right, we’re like one hundred meters.
00:19:19
Speaker 1: Away, yeah, and yards.
00:19:22
Speaker 2: Yeah, it’s pretty it’s pretty impressive.
00:19:24
Speaker 3: And we’re up on this slope right, How can how can this crayfish be living up in what you think is.
00:19:30
Speaker 4: This really dry habitat?
00:19:32
Speaker 3: Well, there’s these perched water tables underneath, and this Jackson Prairie clay that’s you know, the the Yazoo clay people talk about that’s shifty, and well, it’s great habitat for crayfish because it holds moisture, and so they’re there.
00:19:46
Speaker 2: They can live in some really insane areas.
00:19:48
Speaker 3: So compared to a lot of a lot of crayfish species, it’s pretty unusual to find them this high.
00:19:54
Speaker 2: But they’re in high elevations compared to a lot of.
00:19:58
Speaker 4: A lot of different species.
00:20:00
Speaker 1: To your point, like, I know I’ve been out hunting before, yea, and all of a sudden, like huh, crawfish whole way out here.
00:20:06
Speaker 3: Yeah, like what you get out here.
00:20:08
Speaker 1: Right After surveying a few different spots, Calvin picks what he says would be a good one for my first try. In reality, I think he’s trying to find me an easy one to put me on. But we’ll see. I’ve got to pay attention here because he’s about to give me some instruction on how all to do.
00:20:22
Speaker 2: This right down here.
00:20:23
Speaker 4: This one might not be that he should try this one.
00:20:25
Speaker 3: Okay, looks that that MUD’s a little bit darker, so it’s at least a little bit more recent, and.
00:20:34
Speaker 2: So he’s been active, oh you know, maybe in.
00:20:37
Speaker 4: The last few weeks or so.
00:20:39
Speaker 3: But you see that the crayfishes is coming up out of the grass there.
00:20:43
Speaker 4: They’re using their their their.
00:20:45
Speaker 2: Claws to excavate the mud dig deeper.
00:20:49
Speaker 4: Right that water table’s dropping, so.
00:20:51
Speaker 3: They got to go deeper to find water, to find water, and so then they’re just kind of this species kind of a lazy roommate, you know.
00:20:58
Speaker 4: It’s it doesn’t build.
00:21:00
Speaker 3: These large towers like the mudbug species.
00:21:04
Speaker 4: They just slough it off to the side.
00:21:05
Speaker 3: They’re like, yeah, you know, I’m it doesn’t need to look pretty.
00:21:09
Speaker 4: Yeah, it works, but you know, there’s a learning curve to this.
00:21:15
Speaker 1: I would imagine.
00:21:17
Speaker 3: But if you get on man, hopefully can so right that there’s a hole it’s gotta be right here. There might be and sometimes they might have two or three entrances that it’s possible.
00:21:28
Speaker 4: This one has that.
00:21:29
Speaker 3: But like I just poked my hole, my finger down in the hole, and so I can feel that there’s a tunnel. I can feel the tunnel, and without cutting your finger off, you just kind of keep your finger in the tunnel, maybe dig a little semicircle and just start crying at that mud. And as you’re doing it, you just don’t want to drop a bunch of dirt down in the hole.
00:21:56
Speaker 2: It gets harder and it gets more compacted.
00:21:59
Speaker 4: It’s just it’s a harder to dig it.
00:22:00
Speaker 2: But you just keep opening that hole.
00:22:02
Speaker 1: Up and you’re just trying to follow the tunnel.
00:22:05
Speaker 4: Yeah, basically just and so it’s.
00:22:10
Speaker 3: This one.
00:22:10
Speaker 2: This one’s pretty decent.
00:22:12
Speaker 4: I think. So that’s what it’s going to be.
00:22:15
Speaker 3: I would suggest, you know, keep that keep that tunnel open as much as you can without having a bunch of dirt falling it.
00:22:23
Speaker 4: Like I’ll pry with one hand, then.
00:22:24
Speaker 3: I’ll slip another hand behind it and kind of get any dirt that would fall.
00:22:30
Speaker 1: And uh yeah, I can see that thing now.
00:22:32
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, how deep do.
00:22:35
Speaker 1: I need to go.
00:22:37
Speaker 2: Deep enough till we get a crawfish?
00:22:38
Speaker 4: I guess.
00:22:40
Speaker 3: You might end up sticking your whole arm socket in there, all right, And and I would just just open it and open it up enough to eat your hand in there, and your your form in there, your elbowing there, and and if you hit water, then that’s that’s good because usually when you hit water you can.
00:22:58
Speaker 2: Kind of tickle the surface. Crayfish might come up.
00:23:01
Speaker 3: Maybe if that doesn’t happen, you still don’t hit water, then.
00:23:05
Speaker 2: We’ll add water with these jugs.
00:23:08
Speaker 3: And kind of kind of hope to trick them, like, hey, it’s raining right now, you guys might want to come up.
00:23:13
Speaker 4: Okay, that’s kind of what the goal is.
00:23:15
Speaker 1: Yeah, all right, I’m gonna get to digging, all right, keep the comfort trying address that. Don’t know, there’s the wedding green. My wife would not be happy with that.
00:23:27
Speaker 4: The feeling is going to be more difficult, man, It appears to.
00:23:31
Speaker 1: Be now that I have the direction I need. Calvin takes off digging a crawfish hole of his own and leaves me to see if I can figure out the process from here on out. He did stay within easy talking distance of me, though, In case I hit any problems, I take off digging the hole, using the large soul knife to cut parallel to the tunnel that the crawfish has already made, and then using my hands to pull the loose dirt away. And let me tell you, I greatly underestimated how deep I was gonna have to dig. Before I knew it, I was up to my shoulder socket before I even found water. And a crawfish duck, this all by himself, tiny little crawfish. That’s wow. But before I found the shellfish I was looking for, Calvin found success drunk.
00:24:15
Speaker 4: We were just yeah, that’s really, that’s great. That’s great.
00:24:22
Speaker 3: Okay, So yeah, Jackson Praye crayfish.
00:24:26
Speaker 4: This one’s the female.
00:24:27
Speaker 2: The females get a little larger than the males.
00:24:30
Speaker 4: And that’s a male.
00:24:31
Speaker 3: And so I was talking about earlier with the beard.
00:24:36
Speaker 4: Yeah, so it’s on this. Yeah, I see it here. Yeah, So that’s man, that’s cool.
00:24:42
Speaker 3: I’ve never gotten a male and a female of this species in the same same hole before.
00:24:48
Speaker 4: So that’s great because we don’t eat.
00:24:50
Speaker 3: We don’t even know anything about their their reproductive habits.
00:24:55
Speaker 4: No one, no one. So crayfish have eggs underneath their tails. Uh.
00:25:00
Speaker 3: And and then the baby’s hatch from the eggs is kind of like a kangaroo. And no one’s ever seen a female who call it in Barry like the crab has they get a bunch of eggs underneath their tails. Abmins. No one’s ever seen a female in berry.
00:25:13
Speaker 1: So.
00:25:14
Speaker 3: Uh, the fact that we found a male and a female in the same hole, that’s important.
00:25:18
Speaker 4: That’s important to note. Uh.
00:25:23
Speaker 3: Just so because they must be in some kind of court shape. Yeah, yeah, they must be mating. And uh and that’s really really cool, man, that’s cool. So we’ll hold on to these guys we can. I can put them in a bucket for now.
00:25:35
Speaker 4: But that’s cool. I’m glad. Let’s see if you can get I think you’re close.
00:25:38
Speaker 1: I got water, I got yeah, you’re gonna get So Backwoods University attendees, we just had an event of high importance happened on this show. As stated earlier, there’s a whole lot that we don’t know about crawlfish, and just now before our ears and eyes, Calvin has pulled out a male and female Jackson prairie crawlfish out of the crawlfish hole that he was digging, which is something that he has never done and is the first actual indicator of this species mating that has ever been documented. How cool is that? And how lucky are we that we just happened to be there to record it?
00:26:15
Speaker 4: Too cool?
00:26:17
Speaker 1: Not long after that, I finally found some success myself, and.
00:26:22
Speaker 2: We’re gonna try to draw them out and try to draw drom up.
00:26:26
Speaker 3: That’s what I did, So, yeah, you might want to.
00:26:28
Speaker 2: I think I might have.
00:26:30
Speaker 1: So let’s go.
00:26:34
Speaker 3: Get there, catch it off off guard, feel anything hard?
00:26:47
Speaker 4: There you go. I was like, no, I didn’t get anything.
00:26:53
Speaker 1: Look at that.
00:26:53
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, so that’s that’s exactly.
00:26:55
Speaker 1: So, yeah, that’s way cool.
00:26:57
Speaker 4: I’d have told you I didn’t have anything.
00:27:00
Speaker 1: Look at that is living in the mud Jackson Jackson prairie crayfish yep, yep. As a kid who grew up searching ditches for crawfish and snakes, this was a heck of a fun day for me. I even ended up digging up another burrow and finding another crawfish. Calvin did tell me that it was rare for a newbie to go two for two on his first day, and he may have just been being nice, but I’ll take it either way.
00:27:24
Speaker 4: Just another note. But like when you hear the.
00:27:27
Speaker 1: Term Jackson prairie, A lot of times, when people think of Mississippi, you and I’m not talking about people not from here. I’m talking about people that currently live here right now, When you hear Mississippi, you don’t think of prairie. A lot of that has to do with agriculture and plantation pines, but it used to be a whole lot of prairie here, Jackson prairies. I don’t that’s what this crawfish is named after. Too, cool man, Like, when I come back, I think you’ll have I said, I would have been doing this stuff. I wouldn’t have known to do all the methods these biologists know how to do, but I would have been doing this when I was ten years old, and I would have been just as happy as I am right now.
00:28:14
Speaker 4: Always a curious kid.
00:28:23
Speaker 1: Before we wrap up today’s episode, I want to ask Halvin a question about the role crawfish play in our ecosystem. You were talking about, Like I meant to ask you earlier, but I didn’t want to interrupt.
00:28:34
Speaker 4: You mentioned we were if the truck still.
00:28:36
Speaker 1: You said something along the lines like how important they are to like the entire ecosystem. I got to ask you to elaborate on that.
00:28:44
Speaker 2: Yeah, the saying goes is that.
00:28:48
Speaker 3: Everything eats crayfish, and crayfish eat everything. They are the perfect intermediate transfer of nutrients and energies right there. They break down leaf litter and sticks, and they might little bugs that are in the streams. But then in turn they’re also eaten by avian predators, owls, hawks, you know, raccoons and otters, and they’re you know, eaten by snakes and amphibians like the hellbender.
00:29:16
Speaker 1: I’ve seen wild turkeys. Yeah, tiny one.
00:29:18
Speaker 3: Yeah, crayfish are so vital as a bunch of different fish species.
00:29:23
Speaker 4: You can look at the diets of a lot of these.
00:29:26
Speaker 3: Organisms and they’re like, you know, fifty to ninety percent hellbenders are that. It’s almost like ninety five percent crayfish in their diets. Same things with with otters. You know, they’re so vital to the ecosystem. If you don’t have crayfish around then you know, things fall off. Crayfish also, there’s certain species that live in crayfish burrows.
00:29:47
Speaker 2: It’s just animal other people utilize their burrow.
00:29:49
Speaker 1: Yeah, organisms their burrows. Okay, so the go for tortoises yeah, well yeah, so like there’s other critters. But I think there’s like a couple hundred species that utilize gopher tortoise burrows.
00:29:59
Speaker 3: It’s the same thing with crayfish. Yeah, there’s a bunch of different vertebrates. But there’s this animal called crawfish frog that is named aptly after the craw fish because they they live in the burrows of of of craw fish, specifically the burrowing types. Yeah, and so if you don’t have them, you don’t have these amphibians around. So they’re really they’re really important to the ecosystem.
00:30:21
Speaker 1: So like you have the burrow thing, so like mutualistic, and then you have like we did a several months ago, we did this podcast on min Hayden and the Gulf. Yeah, and they were talking about like because they’re anyway without getting into it, people were talking about how important minhayden are and they get overlooked because they’re just this tiny little fish. But they’re like they’re a forage base. Yeah, so it kind of sounds like similar to what you’re describing here, like they’re a forage base for a lot of species, right.
00:30:47
Speaker 3: Right, absolutely super under underutilized and and and really ecosystem engineers, you know, they’re making habitat for other things as well.
00:30:54
Speaker 1: That’s crazy. Yeah, Crawfish, Mudbucks, some fine table fair and some pretty vital players in our ecosystem. Who knew. Think about that next time you pull up to a crawfish ball. What a tasty and cool critter. I want to thank all of you for listening to Backwoods University as well as Bear Grease in this country life. It means a whole whole lot to all of us over here. If you like this episode, share it with a friend this week and stick around because there’s a whole lot more on the way.
Read the full article here