Tuesday Crustie: The river of woe

Surface dwellers, meet Cherax acherontis. Cherax acherontis, meet surface dwerllers.

There are plenty of burrowing crayfish in Australia, but this crayfish from the island of New Guinea is the first cave dweller, not just in the region, but south of the equator. That's quite remarkable, considering that the Pacific is a hotspot of crayfish biodiversity, and there are southern hemisphere crayfish in Madagascar and South America.

The name is from Acheron, one of the rivers the ran through the underworld of Greek mythology.

References

Patoka J, Bláha M, Kouba A. 2017. Cherax acherontis (Decapoda: Parastacidae), the first cave crayfish from the Southern Hemisphere (Papua Province, Indonesia). Zootaxa 4363(1): 137-144. https://doi.org/10.11646/zootaxa.4363.1.7