Crayfish (Orconectes spp.) and sculpins (Cottus spp.) were collected at eight lake trout spawning reefs in Lake Ontario to assess abundance and potential to consume lake trout eggs. Abundance of crayfish ranged from a high of 9.5/m2 in eastern Lake Ontario to 0/m2 in western Lake Ontario where the absence or near absence at four reefs sampled was attributed to cold water upwelling. Sculpin abun...

Early Cretaceous body and trace fossils in Victoria, Australia, establish the oldest known presence of parastacid crayfish (Decapoda: Astacidea, Parastacoidea) in freshwater environments of Australia, and the oldest known crayfish in Gondwana. Parastacid body fossils, comprised of a partial abdomen (Palaeoechinastacus australianus, gen. et sp. nov.) and two chelae, are from a fluvial deposit in...

MAPs (microtubule-associated proteins) were isolated from crayfish walking leg nerves. A major MAP was identified as a high molecular weight protein (270K). This protein co-migrated with mammalian MAP2, stimulated the polymerization of rat brain tubulin into microtubules, and was heat resistant. Rotary shadowing revealed that the 270K MAP is a long thin flexible structure. It formed cross-bridg...

Freshwater crayfish have served as model organisms for over 125 years in scientific research, from areas such as neurobiology and vision research to conservation biology and evolution. Recently, evolutionary histories in the form of phylogenies have served as a critical foundation for testing hypotheses in such diverse research areas as well. In this article, I review the amazing diversity of f...

Noonin, C. 2013. Melanization and Hemocyte Homeostasis in the Freshwater Crayfish, Pacifastacus leniusculus. Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis. Digital Comprehensive Summaries of Uppsala Dissertations from the Faculty of Science and Technology 1086. 48 pp. Uppsala. ISBN 978-91-554-8774-4. Blood cells or hemocytes play important roles in immunity. They are a major source of many immune-related mole...

As one of the members of the economic crustaceans; the freshwater lobsters or as they are commonly known as crayfish in Turkey, belong to the Decapoda order of Crustacea class from the phylum of Arthropoda. The freshwater lobsters, which have over 640 species in the world, are generally distributed to the continents of America and Australia. Although the freshwater lobsters have an abundant num...

This study investigated the social behaviors of blind cave-adapted crayfish and compared them to the behaviors of sighted crayfish. Because blind cave crayfish display phototactic behavior, presumably mediated by the caudal photoreceptors in the sixth abdominal ganglion, we tested whether light, a disturbance in the crayfish’s normal cave environment, altered their normal social behaviors. Obse...

The compound m-chlorophenylpiperazine (m-CPP) is used clinically to manipulate serotonergic function, though its precise mechanisms of actions are not well understood. m-CPP alters synaptic transmission and neuronal function in vertebrates by non-selective agonistic actions on 5-HT(1) and 5-HT(2) receptors. In this study, we demonstrated that m-CPP did not appear to act through a 5-HT receptor ...

Sensory stimuli can produce varied responses depending on the physiological state of an animal. Stressors and reproductive stage can result in altered biochemical status that changes the responsiveness of an animal to hormones and neuromodulators, which affects whole animal behavior in relation to sensory stimuli. Crayfish serve as a model for examining the effects of neuromodulators at the neu...

Inherent difficulties of tracking and observing organisms in the field often leave researchers with no choice but to conduct behavioral experiments under laboratory settings. However, results of laboratory experiments do not always translate accurately to natural conditions. A fundamental challenge in ecology is therefore to scale up from small area and short-duration laboratory experiments to ...