Grad student discovers clawed creature tangled near WA lake. It's a new species

Miami Herald

15-05-2025

A graduate student came across a reddish-brown creature with claws that was tangled up in fishing line at a 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.
A crayfish is a kind of crustacean, like a crab or lobster.
The new species identification was shared in a May 8 study in the peer-reviewed journal Zootaxa.
The graduate student, Eric Larson, has since graduated and is now an associate professor in the Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Sciences at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
He's the lead author of the study, which also documents another new crayfish species in Oregon.
A method called genome skimming was used in identifying the new species.
The Okanagan crayfish is found in north central Washington and south central British Columbia, Canada, researchers said.
It's 'olive brown to brick red,' with a shell, claws and a pair of tubercles that extend from its head, among other features, 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.
Multiple specimens were analyzed as part of the study.
Larson, who's been researching crayfish and similar creatures for years, including when he was a graduate student at the University of Washington in Seattle more than a decade ago, recalls that first Okanagan crayfish he came across — the one tangled in fishing line.
Larson was in the middle of his doctoral studies, and 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, Washington,' Larson told McClatchy News in a phone interview.
Usio encouraged Larson 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 of Washington. 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, plus Cathryn L. Abbott, Scott R. Gilmore, Caren C. Helbing, Mark Louie D. Lopez, Hugh Macintosh, Liane M. Stenhouse and Bronwyn W. Williams.