STARKVILLE — If the crawfish boils held across the South during spring and summer are any indicator, you wouldn’t think the clawed crustaceans rare at all.
While the soon-to-be Cajun-spiced ones aren’t, other species — like the Oktibbeha Rivulet Crawfish — may very well be. At least, that’s what a team with the United States Geological Survey aims to find out.
Corey Dunn, a research fish biologist for USGS and assistant professor at Mississippi State University, is working with graduate student Devin Raburn, to survey the population and more than 150 potential habitats for the species, which is a distant cousin to the red swamp crawfish commonly eaten at restaurants.
As part of that research, Dunn and Raburn have been improving upon a small number of studies conducted since 1950, which noted the species as rare. Those findings were part of a lawsuit issued to the United States Fish and Wildlife Service in 2010 by the Center for Biological Diversity. In the lawsuit, the center petitioned that 403 aquatic and semi-aquatic species should be placed on the endangered list based on limited information about them — certain fish, crawfish, mussels and birds, to name a few.
As a result, USFWS is now conducting studies to help determine the habitats and scope of those species. That study will conclude in 2025.
“Crawfish species aren’t regularly monitored by biologists, so agencies that are charged with conserving native species often do not have the necessary information to determine whether a species is declining or not,” Dunn said. “Studies like this help determine whether a species is actually rare and declining or whether the species simply is common but tough to catch.”
So far, Dunn has narrowed down the habitat of the crawfish from Northeast Mississippi to within the bounds of Oktibbeha County and a small portion of East Lowndes County. Where previous studies found only a few crawfish in very isolated spots, Dunn and have identified more than 23 sample sites where crawfish swim, eat and reproduce. In those spots, they have found between 20 and 100 thriving species members.
“There are 10s and 10s of miles of little streams like this throughout the county,” Dunn said. “So it’s a pretty good indication, and what we’re finding is that the information (we have collected) is much better than we thought it would be.”
How the crawfish are found
USFWS used its partnership with USGS and its Wildlife Cooperative Fish and Wildlife Research Units Program to conduct the study. The program enlists the help of graduate students at several universities for environmental research in exchange for research credit, a paid job and tuition, Dunn said.
Dunn enlisted Raburn and a team of about eight to 12 university technician workers and undergraduate students in January to bore holes in sites where there is standing water along road ditches and cross streams, then install wells to measure water pressure — which in this case indicates water level changes — over time.
There are more than 50 wells throughout the county so far, and the team has found crawfish at sample sites such as Ash Creek and neighborhoods near Sixteen Section Road, to name a few, and this week began inspecting a well in front of Cannon Ford on Highway 182.
Dunn told The Dispatch that she starts at the campus boat barn each day, gearing up with buckets, waders, vests, sample collectors and water testers before heading out with a student worker to help collect samples and gather Crawfish for analysis. However, all are released back into the water.
Dunn’s team also needed permission from the Oktibbeha County Board of Supervisors to install wells and survey roadside ditches in county rights-of-way between Rockhill Road and the intersection of Highway 82 and Highway 45 North Alt to help identify viable habitats.
“In Mississippi, many roadsides were once headwater (streams) before roads were created,” Dunn said. “Many species of crawfish love areas with shallow water full of algae to eat and where they can’t be eaten by fish. At the same time, biologists don’t typically sample roadside ditches, so roadsides are overlooked sources of habitat as long as the ditch hasn’t been covered by concrete.”
Before installing a well, the team conducts water tests to determine if crawfish would locate there. Once complete, Raburn takes 10 minutes to net the water for crawdads and takes small samples of their genetic material, such as regenerative legs, for further research.
She also takes a count of how many crawfish are found at each site and then moves on to the next site.
Each day, she visits four or five sites for about two hours collecting data about the species and the areas she finds them in.
“We are out here every day early,” Raburn said. “It’s honestly a dream come true. This project validated that this (job) was right for me, and it’s something that I just love doing every day when I wake up, come to the boat barn, it’s early, and I have my coffee with me — the sites that we get to see in the streams, the new things that we see together, like a snake we saw (Wednesday). We see frogs. We see so many cool things that we haven’t seen before.”
Raburn and Dunn will be working on the project through its fruition in 2025, when they will turn in a collection of reports and studies completed from the research they will wrap up at the end of this semester. Dunn said that USFWS will use the data to determine whether the crawfish should be listed as a protected species.
“Right now, it’s 2023, so we have a couple of years,” he said. “Before we get to that point, it’ll be a couple years of analyzing data, writing, lots of peer review, lots of reading, to make sure that the conclusions that we come to study are scientifically sound.”
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