Escape Claws

Well here's a bit of followup on the parking lot incident. First of all, one of my alert readers went out to the google maps and got an arial photo of the site. Turns out there's a pond just out of sight past a little fence and some kudzu & grass.

Then I got to looking for info on crawfish migration - and found this article describing a mass migration across a highway in Louisiana.



And here's a link to an article about catching crawfish which includes a paragraph about their migratory behavior. (And also indicates that if you get a good mix of small & large that it indicates a healthy population - which is what I saw here.) LINK TO ARTICLE

All that stuff indicates that they do leave the water to migrate, there was a large freshwater supply nearby (with elevated water levels due to large quantities of rain) and that they can at least walk the distance between two sides of a highway if people leave them alone... so it is plausible that they could have come out of that pond to wander the parking lot at 2:00 am.

I think I'll still followup with an expert...

Attack of the Crawfish!

A woman's scream filled the movie theatre parking lot and I bounded over to help. She and her date were confounded by an enormous bug - which turned out to be a huge crawfish. It rained a lot these past two days - but I think 'twas sexual displays I was seeing out there as the crawfish snipped at each other. (Or at least some kind of territorial display...)

I easily picked up five lively specimens and saw many more squished throughout the parking lot.

I must do some research on this... I've never seen so many crawfish out of water before. The other obvious solution to this is that someone had a bucket of crawfish in their truck and they either crawled out during the movie, or the person dumped them out in the parking lot. But the distribution of the crawfish was over the entire length of the parking lot - which makes me think it was a natural display, not a result of human action.