![]() To increase our understanding of burrowing crayfish behaviors ecology, we encourage the continued use of video-recorded observations in the field and the laboratory. Overall, our results suggest that burrowing crayfishes may exhibit higher levels of surface activity than previously thought. For example, we only observed a single observation of foraging on vegetation during the day, whereas 270 observations of this behavior were documented at night. Additionally, we created an etho-gram based on six observed behaviors and found that each behavior had a strong circadian effect. The percentage of time that individual crayfish was observed at the surface ranged from 21% to 69% per individual, with an average of 42.48% of the time spent at the surface across all crayfish. Throughout 664 hrs of footage, we observed a surprisingly high amount of activity at the surface of their burrows-both during the day and night. In the current study, we conducted a behavioral study of the Little Brown Mudbug, Lacunicambarus thomai using video surveillance to determine their degree of surface activity and behavioral patterns. However, recent work suggests that burrowing crayfishes may exhibit a higher level of surface activity than previously thought. Because burrowing crayfishes spend most of their lives within their burrow, we lack a basic understanding of the behavior and natural history of these species. Burrowing crayfish are considered to be semi-terrestrial, as they burrow to the groundwater-creating complex burrows that occasionally reach 3 m in depth. Opposed to most crayfish species that inhabit permanent bodies of water, a unique burrowing lifestyle has evolved several times throughout the crayfish phylogeny. The species occurs in the Pea, Choctawhatchee, Sepulga, and Conecuh River systems of southeasternĪlabama, in the Black Warrior and Tombigbee River systems in western Alabama and eastern Mississippi, in the Alabama River in central Alabama, and Bear Creek drainage of the Tennessee River, and Yazoo River drainages and occurring throughout the central and eastern portions of Mississippi. Presence of three or four spines along the cervical groove, greatest depth anterior mid-horizontal beneath the antennal scale, the presence of two rows of tubercles along the distal medial palm, with an additional two or three partial or full rows of tubercles on the palm, subpalm of the chela with one to four (mode ¼ three) tubercles, and a gonopod extending greater than 908 and bent cephalodistally 20% at the shoulder. The new species is morphologically similar to C. A new species of crayfish, Cambarus (Lacunicambarus) erythrodactylus, is separated from the Cambarus (L.) diogenes complex.
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