Crazy Crayfish

    This June and July we've been fortunate to have a graduate student assistant work in our Recent Invertebrates Collection. Eric Bright, who is getting his PhD in freshwater ecology, is cataloging and rehousing our crayfish collection. This is really important for us, since we have lots of historical crayfish specimens from rivers and lakes that have had drastic changes over the years in Oklahoma (being damned up, agricultural run off, etc) and therefore its an important collection.

Eric holding up one of the recurated crayfish specimens he worked on

    The first problem that we had twas that many of the jars that the crayfish were stored in were never meant to hold alcohol for long periods of time. There were a few specimens in old peanut-butter and pickle jars, a few in tall jars with wire locks and rubber gaskets that solidified into solid blocks of plasticy goo, and other nasty conditions. This put the specimens at risk since if alcohol was leaking out (which was often the case), they would dry out and not be usable. Further, some were nearly impossible to open because of the rust or rubber sealing the tops, so we couldn't actually look at the specimens. Eric had to break the tops off with pliers and a rubber mallet just to get some of the tops off! The old glass that was recyclable was put in the bucket to be taken to the Norman recycling center, and the crayfish were put into new jars with archival plastic lids that will ensure the alcohol doesn't dry out and they can be opened again.

Some of the old jars that are now ready to be recycled. You can see some of the old, dissolved rubber gasket still stuck on the rims of some of them.

     The second task Eric took on was to catalog what was in each jar, and the information of where, when and how the crayfish were collected. Many of the specimens were collected by the Fish department when they did aquatic surveys in the 1980s and 90s of different bodies of water, but we also have some crayfish from the 1920s and 1930s that were collected when the University of Oklahoma did in massive sampling surveys of the state. Again, these specimens from that era are especially important because a lot of the water ways have changed since then (especially after the Dust Bowl), and we can use them as comparison points. Overall, though, there seems to be a trend in the numbers of species of crayfish going down as our water use and landscape has changed. A neat website about Oklahoma crayfish and their current status can be found here at these links:
http://iz.carnegiemnh.org/crayfish/country_pages/state_pages/oklahoma.htm.
http://www.wildlifedepartment.com/wildlifemgmt/species/crayfish.htm.
    So far Eric has gone through hundreds of jars and thousands of specimens, making sure the information we have for them is kept in a digital file for our database and that they can last at least another 80 years in new jar homes. We are very grateful, as should be hopefully many future generations of Oklahomans that hope to study these neat little guys too.

Yay for crayfish!