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Description
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Photo
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Muddy bottom full of worms to eat with a nice bank full of rubbish to hide in. This is just the place to find a crayfish. You won't see them at first, but throw in a piece of chicken and suddenly a dozen will appear. Every kid for miles around knows, this is the best place to go crayfishing. |
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Freshwater crayfish don't grow as big as their ocean dwelling cousins. This one is about as big as they get. He or she was picked up out of the water in the photo just above this one. So you may be able to buy a bigger crayfish in your local supermarket, but this is about as big as they get in this forest.
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Here's a close up of the crayfish's mouth. Those big white grinders in the centre look like an octopus beak or something. Those are a pair of chompers I wouldn't want to mess with. Check out the eye sticking out of the underside in this photo. I thought the stalks out the top were the eyes. It looks like they are in fact just covers. The actual eye can be pulled out and slipped down the side of the shell so he can poke it out the bottom. You can see a bulge in his shell going from the eye stalk at the top to where this eye has appeared. So he can can be looking at the stream bed underneath him and still look like his eyes are on his top. So while I thought I was having a good look at him, he was having a good look back at me. That's a pretty smart trick!
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The sun is just at the right angle to photo this crayfish clearly at the bottom of the stream. He's got some of the chicken I threw in, so he's not going anywhere.
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These two are so busy fighting that they've ignored the piece of cocktail sausage in the bottom of the photo. Someone else will get it if they don't sort it out soon. The stick in the photo was at just the wrong height to crawl under or over. They had to fight through it.
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Picking up a crayfish like this is usually quite safe as they can't reach back far enough to nip you. However sometimes you can pick up a particularly flexible individual who is just about able to do it. This one sure came close on a few tries.
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Here's a photo taken in the same area as the one above about 18 months later in December 2008. I picked him up and wham - those claws came straight back to sort me out. I think this might be a same animal. You don't forget a fighter like this one in a hurry. He was very calm when held and when I put him back in the stream, he wandered off as though nothing had happened. This may be the biggest crayfish I've ever seen in this stream. Perhaps if you can reach back far enough to nip anybody who tries to pick you up, you don't get caught by kids with buckets. He'll live to produce a whole race of crayfish like him and them watch out!
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Crayfish often have a few of these blobs on them. They are highly mobile and seem to have a mouth on one end. It don't know if these are helpful cleaners keeping the crays clean or bloodsucking parasites. This individual had more than his fair share.
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Here is a closer look at our louse covered cray. Don't know what they are or why one is crawling onto my finger. If these things can bite through a crayfish's armor, what can it do to my finger? This could hurt...
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Here's the little blob on my finger. I'm expecting to get bloodsucked any second, but the blob seemed harmless. You can see him reaching into the air in this shot. In Viet Nam soldiers bitten by leeches used a cigarette to burn them and they would let go. I don't smoke, so if he bites, I might have a problem. |
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A lot of people assume these remains are from a dead crayfish. However, it is more likely that this is only a shell. A crayfish has moulted and here is the old skin. You can often see crayfish that have recently done this. They are a ghostly white in colour. The shell darkens and hardens later.
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In June 07 we had the biggest snowstorm here for many years. Here is the same area from the top of the page taken from the other direction. Don't worry about the frozen crayfish. They are tough little guys and can survive much worse than this. Crayfish don't hibernate, but they do get very slow when it's this cold.
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