Some simply plug the mouth of their burrow with a ball of mud.ĭuring their several-month period underground, females lay eggs and hatch their young, which cling to hair-like pleopods found under the adults’ tails. Chimneys, made of mud carried from the burrow by the crawfish and placed around its entrance tend to be very small or even nonexistent. Their burrows tend to be simple and short, just deep enough to find moisture to keep their gills wet. Females of all crawfish species brood their eggs and young beneath their tails.īeginning with the last first, tertiary burrowers are those that only resort to digging burrows when surface waters dry up, especially during the hottest part of the year. Scientists group all crawfish into three categories, based on their digging proclivities: primary burrowers, secondary burrowers and tertiary burrowers. These are not merely decorative, but put to good use by these industrious excavators.įew people know that crawfish in general are as much creatures of the underground as they are creatures of the water.

One of the most-noticeable characteristics of both devil crawfish species is the massive spade-shaped pincers. The painted devil crawfish is even more attractive, being the same overall color, but with the addition of several yellow, orange or red length-wise stripes running down the body and tail. The devil crawfish is an attractive green color, set off by bright, wine-red margins at the edges of each joint in the shell. They are identical to each other in every way except body color, something that makes astacologists (crawfish experts) very nervous about declaring separate species instead of one. Among those are the unusual species dubbed the devil crawfish, Cambarus diogenes, and the painted devil crawfish, Cambarus ludovicianus.īoth species, if they are separate species, are big animals, growing as large as the familiar red swamp crawfish cooked at crawfish boils. Walls, author of the beautiful 240-page book Crawfishes of Louisiana, lists 39 species as occurring in Louisiana.

North America is crawfish headquarters, with 353 species - 95 percent of which are found in the southeastern U.S. Worldwide, scientists have identified over 450 species of freshwater crawfish. And there are a lot more species of crawfish than the red and white crawfish - the ones most commonly eaten by humans. Each May, Shreveport - that most un-Cajun of Louisiana cities - holds Mudbug Madness, a four-day blowout on the banks of the Red River.īut there is a lot more to crawfish than eating them. And crawfish love isn’t confined to South Louisiana.