Right! Apropos another post, let’s talk about lawn crayfish aka The Lobsters Beneath Our Feet!
This is Craw-Bob. He’s about three and a half inches long.
Long ago, when I had only gardened in the Southeast for a year or two, I saw an interesting hole in a flowerbed. It was rather deep and had a muddy front porch. I gazed into this hole, thinking “Ooh! Is it a rodent? A snake? A toad?”
It was unmistakably a crustacean claw. And it was in a hole in my yard. My terrestrial yard! Why was there a crustacean in my flowerbed?!
I could not have been more astounded if an octopus tentacle had come flopping out. I ran screaming for my husband and the internet, both of whom said “Yeah, that’s a lawn crayfish, they do that.”
And yes. There are about 400 species of crayfish* in North America, and a not inconsiderable number of them are burrowing species. The devil crayfish, which builds little mud towers, ranges from the Rockies to the Atlantic and as far north as Ontario. There are a number of other species as well. Some are limited to stream banks, but many burrow in lawns, flowerbeds, and other places with consistently damp soil, which means that there is a non-zero chance that when you wander around the grass, a tiny lobster is lurking somewhere beneath your feet.
You would think that more people would know this, but at no point in my life had anyone ever mentioned it to me.
Being me, I immediately set out to determine if other people knew about lawn crayfish and I had just somehow missed it. I took an informal poll—by which I mean I accosted random strangers at the farmer’s market, the coffee shop, and my doctor’s office—and discovered a stark divide. Half the people looked at me like I was telling them I’d seen a lawn chupacabra and the other half looked at me like I’d asked if they’d ever heard of squirrels.
It was not divided by social class or education. The farmer with the heirloom breed hogs knew about them, his wife did not. My nurse practitioner first thought I was hallucinating, then went out into the clinic, and began demanding to know if her co-workers had heard of this. My barista was like “Yeah, mudbugs,” but he’s from Florida, so may not count.
My theory is that if you know they’re there, it’s just a fact of life so obvious that you don’t bother to comment on it, and if you don’t—well, why would you ever assume that any given hole in the ground comes from a goddamn MINI LOBSTER? And since they mostly just hang out underground during the day and don’t really hurt anything, it just doesn’t come up very often, until one day you’re at the farmer’s market, just trying to sell some organic tomatoes, and a wild-eyed woman with a Studio Ghibli T-shirt descends on you yelling “Are you aware of lawn crayfish?!”
(Yes, they’re edible, but it’s a lot of work popping them individually out of their burrows.)
During torrential rains, they will often leave their burrows and wander around, which is how I got the photos of Craw-Bob. My hound spotted him in the garden and poked him with her nose, whereupon Craw-Bob poked back. Hound, not sure what was happening but that it was probably bad, began doing her “release the humans!” alarm bark, and I came out to find her toe to toe with a crustacean who was waving its claws and presumably screaming “Come on if you think you’re hard enough!” in Lobster.
Despite their willingness to fight everything, they’re pretty harmless. The most they do is move soil from underground to a little pile above. I’m sure golf courses hate them. Our local county extension office suggests “These nonprolific creatures should be appreciated like an interesting bird or turtle living on the property.” Some, like the Greensboro burrowing crayfish, are so rare they were thought to be extinct until somebody found one in the backyard.
So. Lawn crayfish. They exist! And could be lurking underfoot as we speak!
*or crawfish, depending on where you’re from.
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