This person with her head in a muddy hole is my museum co-worker Bronwyn Williams.
She's digging for a crayfish, something that's right now known as a sickle crayfish.
"I've lost the hole, big time!" They're not the easiest things to catch.
All right.
This burrow is...
All right, i'll try the water trick on this one. If this doesn't work then...
Oh, there we go!
Working at a science museum a lot of my research colleagues are taxonomic experts.
They're the people who know enough about a particular group of organisms where they can tell if
something's different enough to be called the new species. I don't have that level of
expertise but i'm constantly impressed by the people around me who do, and i want to share
some of their stories here on this channel. So, recently I followed one of my colleagues
out into the field to collect a crayfish. This is one she'll soon describe as a new species.
It gets to the water by digging. It constructs the burrow all the way down to the water table.
Okay so we've got several different burrows here. But what I want you to see
is this right here which is a chimney. You can tell it's fresh it's got fairly wet mud balls
and this one's actually capped as well. So there is no hole, and this is done the
crayfish actually will plug the the top of their chimney when it gets kind of really too hot
to sort of void off any desiccation. So we have another chimney here so by the side of the path.
You can tell this one's dried out so it's not nearly as fresh. It's not plugged, not guaranteed
that there's an individual in there but i'd probably try to try to give this a dig as well.
These chimneys are actually species specific, and so what's kind of neat
is the ones that are dried like this. Gently..., sort of remove this from from the grass
so the size of the mud moles and the shape of kind of how this chimney is constructed can be very
species diagnostic. Specimens that I collect when i'm in the field ultimately end up back here
in the non-molluscan invertebrate collection. They're fixed they're housed in in ethanol
basically for, you know, long-term i.e hopefully forever storage. Okay, so we're now in one of the
three major collections ranges or rooms out at the research lab the museum. This area is sort
of dedicated to the non-molluscan invertebrates which include all of the crayfishes. The idea of
being stewards of this collection is to make sure that we sort of care for and maintain these
for permanent use. Kind of, these are more foothills and piedmont crayfishes,
and some of our many 'we are currently working on' crayfishes over on on sort of this side.
When a species is described, so let's say we were to take one of these sort of known,
undescribed species back there and describe it, you designate what's called a type series.
Which are specific individuals that you use that are sort of designated as the examples what that
species is. And we have several hundred of these these type specimens of crayfishes that we keep
in fireproof cabinets under lock and key, they're that valuable.
This one houses most of our crayfish type specimens,
which are kind of in these four shelves. And one of the specimens that i'm particularly proud of
is this one, it's the south mountains crayfish. This is the holotype
which I helped describe in 2019. It's only found in the state of North Carolina and primarily
kind of in and just outside of south mountain state park. I'm interested in crayfish for the
sake of crayfish but also all of the other organisms that basically live on the crayfish.
I study a group of worms that are closely related to leeches and a group of ostracods or seed shrimp
that are obligate inhabitants of of crayfishes. Different species are actually sort of found on
different parts of the crayfish. Sometimes you'll find them in the gill chamber, sometimes
they'll be between the bases of the walking legs or on the claws. And sometimes they'll be
very visible you'll have one that's right on the rostrum or that nose like projection. My goal
with my research with this work is to ensure that the entirety of the biodiversity of crayfishes in
this state is adequately conserved. There are 48 name species in North Carolina.
Given what we have discovered over the last couple years we probably have doubled that number.
So right now, this is considered the the sickle crayfish but let's say in another two
or three years down the road, once our work is completed, this will become probably the newest
species to be described from North Carolina. Which is pretty neat for having something
like this sort of in the outskirts of Charlotte. So there's a lot left to discover.
I originally made this video to run as a local PBS segment but I thought it was cool enough
that I wanted to re-edit it and show it here. If you like this type of content let me know in
the comments there are many more stories like this around here to tell thanks for watching.