Crayfish Hunter

I may have written about this last year, but once again, I have picked up a summer job working with a professor and her doctorate student. My job: playing in creeks.  The student is doing his dissertation on the mercury content of crayfish (or crawdads as we called them) in acid mine drainage impacted streams.

I went out for the first time this past Saturday and it was a beautiful sunny day to be creeking. The water was a little high in some of the sites, so we went up to the headwaters and found good stream flow with more life than I thought would be able to be sustained in these creeks. Minnows, tadpoles, water striders, and of course crayfish were seen just about everywhere. 

To determine the gut contents of the crayfish they have to be a certain size. So, when I'm walking through the creek, looking down, spying all the critters in the crevices of the rocks, I am looking for the biggest ones. And just like a good fisherman, I had a story of the BIG one that got away. Oh well, can't get them all.

Probably the creepiest story is when I went to check our traps. Last year and at most sites this year we used nets to catch the crayfish. However, we tried a new method in one of the sites at the beginning of the day. My partner had minnow traps that we baited and set out in the water. We decided to leave them there and check them on our way back in to town. At the end of the day, we stopped at the site and I volunteered to check the traps and bring them to the bank.  The first trap was empty. And the second and third. Obviously the traps weren't going to work, but I still needed to retrieve them. The fourth trap was deep in the water and I thought my partner must have waited it down with a rock. Not so much. It was filled with a snake. Big dead snake more like it. It freaked me out for a second but I composed myself and brought the trap to the bank, opened it, and dumped it out. Yep, dead snake. 

This will be my summer. Playing in creeks and building a house.