New crayfish species discovered in Washington lake

A graduate student came across a reddish-brown creature with claws that was tangled up in fishing line at a north-central Washington lake – and it turned out to be a new species.

Its scientific name is Pacifastacus okanaganensis, but it’s known commonly as the Okanagan crayfish. The new species identification was shared in a study released May 8 in the peer-reviewed journal Zootaxa.

The species, found in north-central Washington and south-central British Columbia, is “olive brown to brick red,” with a shell, claws and a pair of tubercles that extend from its head, according to researchers.

Its name comes “from an Okanagan-Salish language place name” and acknowledges its distribution “throughout the Okanagan and Thompson plateaus and Okanagan Lake, British Columbia, as well as Okanogan County, Washington,” researchers said.

The graduate student, Eric Larson, was in the middle of his doctoral studies at the University of Washington more than a decade ago.

A colleague from Japan, Nisikawa Usio – also an author on the study – shared that he’d come across an unusual crayfish “up the mountain from Spokane,” Larson told McClatchy News in a phone interview.

Usio encouraged Larson, now an associate professor at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, to take a look.

Larson did just that. He liked to hike and camp, and in his free time, he’d “drive over the mountains and look for this animal,” he said.

He found it on the bank of a lake in the Okanogan-Omak area. When he saw it, he knew it was what he was looking for.

To Larson, crayfish are fascinating, but “I think people can misjudge their diversity,” he said.

There are hundreds of species globally, and they differ “in their habitat associations, how they interact with their food web (and) how abundant they might be,” Larson said.

That means they’re not interchangeable and moving them around can have ripple effects, he said.

Identifying the new species is meaningful, he said, including because “we can’t really manage or conserve these animals if we don’t know they exist.”

The research team included Usio, Cathryn L. Abbott, Scott R. Gilmore, Caren C. Helbing, Mark Louie D. Lopez, Hugh Macintosh, Liane M. Stenhouse and Bronwyn W. Williams.