Local Groups Examine Crayfish in the Buskin River

Blythe Brown and Kelly Krueger hold up crayfish they sampled from Buskin river. Kayla Desroches/KMXT
Blythe Brown (right) and Kelly Krueger hold up crayfish they sampled from Buskin river. Kayla Desroches/KMXT

Kayla Desroches/KMXT

The Sun’aq Tribe of Kodiak and the Kodiak Soil and Water Conservation District have teamed up to determine just how much of a presence one invasive species has in the Buskin River.

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Blythe Brown, project coordinator with the Conservation District, says her organization has been getting reports of crayfish in the Buskin River since the early 2000s and received funding from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service last year to investigate.

“We found males, we found females, females with eggs, and crawfish of all sizes, so obviously they were breeding, so this year Sun’aq received a grant to continue the Soil and Water Conservation District work and to expand on it, to try different trapping method and different locations.”

According to a Sun’aq Tribe press release, the Bureau of Indian Affairs Invasive Species Program granted the project funding in May, and researchers have been sampling and surveying one mile of river per week.

Brown says while they found a few carcasses of red swamp crayfish, which may have been ordered as food, the majority of crayfish they finding are signal crayfish.

“They’re native to the Pacific Northwest, and that’s one of the reasons why Fish and Wildlife Service and the Soil and Water Conservation District and Sun’aq – why we are so alarmed because they will survive quite well here, because they survive in the Pacific Northwest where their weather and habitat is similar.”)

As far as how the crayfish got to the island, she speculates that people may have ordered them online for school projects, pets, or bait.

And now that they’re in river, it’s still a mystery how they might affect the habitat, especially for fish.

Kelly Krueger, a biologist with the Sun’aq Tribe, says the tribe’s interest is rooted in subsistence fishing, because the Buskin River is the biggest subsistence river on the island.

Subsistence fishing has actually proved a useful method for collecting samples for the study. While Krueger and Brown say they’ve used a variety of approaches of getting their hands on crayfish, with different success rates, the most successful has been literally pulling the crayfish from the water.

Krueger says between trappers, snorkelers, and divers allowing the team to sample their catches and their own efforts, the team has sampled a total of 228 crayfish.

“When we sample the crayfish, we are sampling the total length, so their whole body, and then we’re also do the carapace, which is from the head- it’s like their exoskeleton. It separates the main body between the tail, so we’re just seeing how long that is. And then we flip the crayfish over and we’re determining the sex.

Following the sampling, she explains the researchers collect ten voucher specimens they send to the Department of Fish and Game. They then “discard the rest sanitarily” by freezing and therefore killing them.

Looking forward, Krueger says they’re working out methods to sample crayfish, like electrofishing, or using a current to stun the crayfish. They’ll also turn to the same methods that many members of the public use.

“Next year we’re looking at having a full time snorkeling crew doing these transects perpendicular to the lake, going around the lake, and seeing how far around the lake they have started living in these different places. So, we’re going to do that.  We’re also going to have some scuba divers going down to the bottom of the lake to see how far down these crayfish are living.”

Krueger and Brown say they would like people catching crayfish in the area to reach out to them and allow them to sample the animals before they take them home.

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