Abstract

This study reports on the development and testing of an inexpensive method allowing very fine scale investigations on the in-stream, and terrestrial movements of freshwater crayfish: using spools of thread. Using this method (spooling) we investigated the movements of the species Euastacus sulcatus over a period of 15 months in the Gold Coast hinterland of Queensland: this allowed us to collect previously unavailable data on the movements of this species. Our results indicate male crayfish visit more burrows than females, and distances moved into burrows increased ~5 times in the second year of the study. No effects of weather conditions were evident on the movements of crayfish, however crayfish departed release sites, and moved upstream, in response to falling stream discharge levels: presumably moving to the source of the spring fed streams. We detected very strong differences in crayfish movements (e.g. no out of water movements by crayfish in 2002, and differing burrow visitation behaviour/depth), which were attributable solely to the year of the study: we suspect these differences may be due to the current severe drought. This simple method quickly generates large amounts of detailed data: we expect spooling may be useful for investigating movements of other species.

Supplemental Documents

• There are no supplementary documents for this article

Cited By

Citations: