Now is the perfect time to get cray-watching!

Hey Everyone, thanks for your interest in CRAYWATCH! Although crayfish are known as the 'charismatic megafauna' of a small stream ecosystem, very few people are aware of the incredibly aggressive nature of some invasive species. Most native crayfish populations on the European continent have been wiped out due to invasive crayfish who out-compete them for food and shelter. CRAYWATCH will provide us with an opportunity to monitor and prevent the spread of potentially invasive species (especially the asexually reproducing Marmokrebs).

Happy searching everyone, and thanks so much for your help with this project!

Science for Citizens

The Craywatch project is now up at the Science for Citizens website. I’m particularly pleased by this nice introductory blog post by Elizabeth Walters!

Join the project, and you too can have one of these:

I'm a citizen
astacologist

(Astacology is the study of crayfish.)

Welcome to Craywatch

Today is the debut of a new citizen science project, Craywatch. I’m your host, Zen Faulkes (a.k.a. Doctor Zen). I’d like to tell you a little about this project and how it came about.

The goal of this project is to collect data about the location of crayfish species in North America, with a particular eye to monitoring for invasive species. North America is the biodiversity hotspot for crayfish, but crayfish are under a lot of pressure, not the least of which is competition from newly introduced invasive crayfish.

There’s the why for this project. If you’ll indulge me, I’d like to talk a bit about how this project emerged below the fold.