I don’t know if I’ve ever written just about crayfish- odd, given the outsize role they’ve played in my life. One of my earliest outdoor memories is standing ankle deep in a gravel bottomed Ozark stream with my grandmother, bent over, with an aquarium net, catching crawdads as they scooted along the bottom. She showed me how to hold them so I wouldn’t get pinched, showed me how they swim backwards. I was only five or six, and I remember being amazed at the variety of color- shades of tan and orange and red and olive, mixed with dark bars and stripes and spots.

Crayfish paid the bills in college and during my Master’s. There’s at least 400 species in North America, with more still being discovered and described, and most of those species are poorly known. There may be a species description in a dusty old journal, but beyond that…little information on species’ distributions, abundances, life history, population genetic structure, habits, threats…the sort of basic information needed for conservation planning often doesn’t exist. That’s a shame, because of the outsize role crayfish play in ecosystems. They eat anything, and turn inedible bits of leaves and algae into protein that feeds fish, birds, mammals, reptiles, and amphibians. Their burrowing creates habitat for other invertebrates like mayflies and caddisflies, and on land their castles and tunnels create refuge for amphibians, reptiles, and small mammals in grasslands and prairies when those habitats burn.

As invertebrates go crayfish are pretty charismatic, too. There’s something about crayfish that fascinates people who may be more familiar with them on a dinner plate than as a part of natural systems. They’re also a perfect starting point for ecological conversations ranging from food webs to endemism to invasive species and biodiversity loss, conversations more relevant today than ever.

The Chickasaw believe crayfish made the world. That’s how important they are.