Tuesday afternoon Jeff Simmons, an aquatic biologist at TVA, holds different types of crayfish as he talks about his research on crayfish and the new species he discovered, the Barbicambarus Simmonsi.Whether you call them crayfish, crawfish or crawdads, Jeff Simmons literally will leave no rock unturned in searching for the freshwater crustaceans.
But even Simmons was surprised to find an 8-inch-long crawfish with a distinctive bearded antennae in a Lawrence County, Tenn., creek two years ago.
The TVA aquatic zoologist first suspected the unique creature had been brought to Factory Creek in south-central Tennessee from the Green River in Kentucky, where a similar crawfish lives. But after further investigation and research by the nation’s top crawfish scientists, the find proved to be a new species of one of America’s largest crawfish.
“It’s an extraordinary find in a river that has been sampled and studied for years,” said Christopher Taylor, a University of Illinois professor who specializes in the study of crawfish. “This has not been seen by scientific eyes before.”
In a new research paper documenting the crawfish species, Taylor and Eastern Kentucky University biologist Guenter Schuster recognized Simmons’ find by putting his name on it – Barbicambarus simmonsi.