Crayfish from Crockett, TX

[777]

Here are a couple of large crayfish that I caught from a creek a couple of weeks ago. I preserve them the same way I preserve my crab specimens, I just take all the meat out and put the exoskeleton back together.
Crayfish are much less time consuming when it comes to taking out the meat because you can use tweezers to take out all of the body and tail meat just from an incision at the bottom of the tail.

Crabs take more time because I have to detach the carapace, the legs, and the claws to be able to take out all of the meat and assemble the whole skeleton like a 3d crab puzzle. The claws are the only thing I have to detach from crayfish when preserving them.





This one is my favorite. There is not much to say about it, just a chunky crayfish.



The long lanky arms and pinchers makes this crayfish harder to pick up without getting pinched.




These are the only two species i've seen here so far. According to google, the are more than 40 species of crayfish living here in Texas. I have no idea what species these two are, so feel free to tell me what they are if you know.

[58chevy]

They look great, but I prefer to boil them & eat them.

[exoticimports]

I think your specimens are very cool. Do hope you label them, like insects.

I'm tracking down a crawfish mystery myself, and the local Econ college can't answer it. I found the shoreline littered with blue claws. We have no blue crawfish in our area. One species is reported to have a blue morph...but 100% of these claws were blue. Oh, BTW, clearly the gulls got the bodies.

It was suggested that the claws had turned blue after death, but I've seen thousands of dead crawfish, and none had ever turned blue.

We wrote it off as a probably dump of blue crawfish by a nearby pet shop, since it happened at the beginning of COVID.

But then I found another blue claw at the mouth of a stream leading to the same lake, but 15km from the first site. I figured two possibilities (1) a wash-up from the other site "dump" or (2) those blue crawfish are in that stream. So I searched the stream, turning over rocks, without finding a single crawfish. Odd.

So that was the end of that. Until, in a different, unrelated and unconnected creek some 40km distant I found ANOTHER blue claw! Again, I turned over rocks, without finding a single crawfish, which in itself is very odd.

Now, this is my stomping ground. And as my family knows, I turn over rocks on land, rocks in water; logs, anything that might have something under it. I drag them off to creeks, to swamps, etc. NEVER have I seen a blue crawfish in the wild or a blue claw, and suddenly they're all over...but where are the crawfish??

My current theory is that these aren't "rock" crawfish, they are mud burrowers. That's why I can't find any. Why I can't find the common rock crawfish I don't know.

Anyway, leading back to your question, note that there are different crawfish that live in different geographic areas, and behave differently. You might try a crawfish/ minnow trap.

Let me know if you find a blue claw.

Chuck

[777]

Jul 21, 2020 12:44:52 GMT -8 exoticimports said:

I think your specimens are very cool. Do hope you label them, like insects.

I'm tracking down a crawfish mystery myself, and the local Econ college can't answer it. I found the shoreline littered with blue claws. We have no blue crawfish in our area. One species is reported to have a blue morph...but 100% of these claws were blue. Oh, BTW, clearly the gulls got the bodies.

It was suggested that the claws had turned blue after death, but I've seen thousands of dead crawfish, and none had ever turned blue.

We wrote it off as a probably dump of blue crawfish by a nearby pet shop, since it happened at the beginning of COVID.

But then I found another blue claw at the mouth of a stream leading to the same lake, but 15km from the first site. I figured two possibilities (1) a wash-up from the other site "dump" or (2) those blue crawfish are in that stream. So I searched the stream, turning over rocks, without finding a single crawfish. Odd.

So that was the end of that. Until, in a different, unrelated and unconnected creek some 40km distant I found ANOTHER blue claw! Again, I turned over rocks, without finding a single crawfish, which in itself is very odd.

Now, this is my stomping ground. And as my family knows, I turn over rocks on land, rocks in water; logs, anything that might have something under it. I drag them off to creeks, to swamps, etc. NEVER have I seen a blue crawfish in the wild or a blue claw, and suddenly they're all over...but where are the crawfish??

My current theory is that these aren't "rock" crawfish, they are mud burrowers. That's why I can't find any. Why I can't find the common rock crawfish I don't know.

Anyway, leading back to your question, note that there are different crawfish that live in different geographic areas, and behave differently. You might try a crawfish/ minnow trap.

Let me know if you find a blue claw.

Chuck

I have a theory, but it may be wrong. I see people on the internet ask why their pet crawfish turn blue, and other people say that it is because of the water chemistry or something like that. It is either what the crawfish are eating, or how their water conditions are that turns them blue.

You say that you saw no crawfish after seeing all the blue claws, perhaps there was something in the water that messed up the water chemistry and killed them off but also turned them blue. I think you should get a sample of the water have it tested.

[nomihoudai]

I love these preserved crayfish, keep up the good work. Do they change much in color? Did you ever try to take a picture when catching them, and later painting with acrylics over the specimen to get some of the colors back or more vibrant?

I moved to Texas again last year (this time Dallas). Being able to eat boiled mud bugs is one of the many perks that came with the move

I didn't know that there is so many species of these in Texas, this was new knowledge to me. Currently, one of the few times where I leave the house (due to Corona) is to go biking in a nearby park. There is puddles of water that dry out on a regular basis that have shrimps in them. At the moment, the puddles are dried out and I wonder how the shrimp manage to survive for long periods in the mud (I suppose this is where they are hiding right now).

[nomihoudai]

I wonder if the first one is a Faxonius cyanodigitus. It's really hard to tell. www.inaturalist.org/taxa/776103-Faxonius-cyanodigitus.

Here is an overview of the other 37 species in Texas: www.inaturalist.org/observations?place_id=18&taxon_id=47783&view=species.

[777]

They don't change color much after i preserve them. The second crawfish has minor color change. I couldn't get the thin membrane out of its body, so it dried and darkened and is showing through the exoskeleton. I'm not worried about it because I know the darkened areas will disappear eventually and the color will be normal again. The first crawfish came out just fine, no change in color whatsoever.

I do take pictures of crustaceans before I kill them. I have to paint under the exoskeletons of my crabs because their color disappears as I take out their flesh. I only have small crabs right now, but I'm probably going to have to paint on the outside of larger crabs because of their thicker skeletons. Painting underneath the skeletons keeps the surface texture.

The first crawfish does look very similar to Faxonius cyanodigitus, the only difference is the color. Crawfish do change color when they're alive, so I wouldn't be surprised if mine is Faxonius cyanodigitus.

[thejsonboss]

Gotta say, collecting crawfish is not something I had ever thought of. You did a great job preserving them!

[777]

Jul 21, 2020 12:44:52 GMT -8 exoticimports said:

I think your specimens are very cool. Do hope you label them, like insects.

I'm tracking down a crawfish mystery myself, and the local Econ college can't answer it. I found the shoreline littered with blue claws. We have no blue crawfish in our area. One species is reported to have a blue morph...but 100% of these claws were blue. Oh, BTW, clearly the gulls got the bodies.

It was suggested that the claws had turned blue after death, but I've seen thousands of dead crawfish, and none had ever turned blue.

We wrote it off as a probably dump of blue crawfish by a nearby pet shop, since it happened at the beginning of COVID.

But then I found another blue claw at the mouth of a stream leading to the same lake, but 15km from the first site. I figured two possibilities (1) a wash-up from the other site "dump" or (2) those blue crawfish are in that stream. So I searched the stream, turning over rocks, without finding a single crawfish. Odd.

So that was the end of that. Until, in a different, unrelated and unconnected creek some 40km distant I found ANOTHER blue claw! Again, I turned over rocks, without finding a single crawfish, which in itself is very odd.

Now, this is my stomping ground. And as my family knows, I turn over rocks on land, rocks in water; logs, anything that might have something under it. I drag them off to creeks, to swamps, etc. NEVER have I seen a blue crawfish in the wild or a blue claw, and suddenly they're all over...but where are the crawfish??

My current theory is that these aren't "rock" crawfish, they are mud burrowers. That's why I can't find any. Why I can't find the common rock crawfish I don't know.

Anyway, leading back to your question, note that there are different crawfish that live in different geographic areas, and behave differently. You might try a crawfish/ minnow trap.

Let me know if you find a blue claw.

Chuck

Any updates on your mystery?