Weirdest Crawdad

[LarrySTL]

Today I was on the Big River above Hwy 8 and saw The Wierdest Crawdad I have ever seen. It was 3 inches or 3+ long , close to an inch side to side for most of the length of its body, ( which was a lot bigger, especially in width than what I've seen so far this spring) and heres the wierd part.

It was colored alternating bands, maybe 3/4 of an inch wide, of bright yellow and dark. I'm saying dark because it seemed black, but could have been dark brown or dark green. The yellow was French's Mustard yellow, the yellow of the emoticons here on OAF. Not tan, not pale something, but as yellow as a Penzoil motor oil bottle. It had the colors and stripes of a bumblebee. I was wading and it zipped in front of me and stopped in perhaps a foot of clear water for long enough for me to wish that Ron or one of the other good photographers was there to take a pic of it.

Somebody tell me you've seen these too so I know I'm not losing it, or at least tell me its some lead mine tailings mutation or something. I just spent 30 minutes googling pics of crawdads and I dont see one like it.

[Mitch f]

This is the Golden Craw that's very common in the Ozark Streams, did it look like this?

[jdmidwest]

They tend to get that way in lighter colored gravel.

[Outside Bend]

Freshly molted crayfish can also be very vividly colored. Most likely it was the golden crayfish, possibly Harrison's or the belted crayfish, which are native only to the Meramec Watershed.

[LarrySTL]

Whew, that means I'm not losing it. It looked like the one in Mitch's pic except if we took the lighter bands and moved them to banana yellow, we'd have it. I had wondered if molting could produce strange colors temporarily, but I don't know if thats the case.

Thanks.

[Al Agnew]

Golden crayfish can vary in color...they always have the alternating dark and light bands, but the light color can be anything from mustard yellow to a medium shade of olive. And I agree with JD, the light bands tend to be lighter and brighter when the crayfish is living on a clean gravel bottom. But Outside Bend is right, too, it could have been a belted crayfish, which has very sharply contrasting light and dark bands, and which is only found in Big River and the Meramec just downstream from the mouth of Big River. Or it could have been a saddlebacked crayfish, which is fairly similar in color to the golden and is found only in the Meramec River system. However, both of these have a maximum size of about 2.6 inches.

MDC's crayfish book "The Crayfish of Missouri", by William L. Pflieger, is a great resource for finding out about the various species, but I think I've found one piece of poor information in it. It lists the papershell crayfish as only being found in the Prairie Faunal Region, not in the Ozarks; however, I'm convinced that the gray green crayfish with thin shells and small pincers that I always used to catch and use on upper Big River were papershells. I need to take the time to try to catch some and key them out the next time I'm on Big River.

[Mitch f]

I actually caught a couple of golden craws is my craw trap

http://youtu.be/3m17CaK27HQ

[jdmidwest]

Good eating

[Chief Grey Bear]

If you are a smallmouth. Those that Mitch caught won't taste very good at all. But I would try a half dozen if he sent them to me.

[Al Agnew]

Beautiful, Mitch!