ok..so they are finding new species on islands..makes sense..but this in either near or right on the new madrid fault line
is this a sci-fi thing..fumes or whatever mutating the bugs to be bigger?..killing off the residents?(fish and birds)
or just the fact the humans are so piss-poor at seeing critters that have been living around them for millenium?
toss-up, isn't it?
...........................
The new crayfish should not have been easily overlooked,
as it is huge -- twice the size of other species, the team at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Eastern Kentucky University said.
http://www.postchronicle.com/news/science/article_212344527.shtml................................
New ''Giant'' Crayfish Discovered in Tennessee
posted January 20, 2011
Photo by L. Brian Stauffer
The new species (left) is more than twice the size of a typical crayfish found in Shoal Creek.
Scientists around the country are buzzing about the discovery a new "giant" crayfish in a Tennessee stream.
Barbicambarus simmonsi is about 5 inches long and belongs to a class of species known for their unusual "bearded" antennae. The hair-like bristles enhance the sensory abilities of the crustacean.
The discovery was made by two scientists from Illinois in Shoal Creek, a southern Tennessee stream the flows into the Tennessee River in North Alabama.
"This isn't a crayfish that someone would have picked up and just said, 'Oh, it's another crayfish,' and put it back," University of Illinois aquatic biologist Chris Taylor, the curator of crustaceans at the Illinois Natural History Survey and a co-discoverer of the new species, said in a press release. "If you were an aquatic biologist and you had seen this thing, because of the size and the setae on the antennae, you would have recognized it as something really, really different and you would have saved it."
Taylor, along with Kentucky University biological sciences professor Guenter Schuster found their first specimen under one of the biggest rocks in the deepest part of Shoal Creek.
The new species is described in a paper in the Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington.
The pair had been tipped off by photos sent to Schuster in 2009 from a colleague who had forwarded them from a man who had seen the crayfish. The pair decided to take a field trip to the creek. For the first couple hours, they saw nothing out of the ordinary.
"We had worked so hard and long that we were ready to give up and find another site," Schuster said in the release. "And we saw this big flat boulder underneath a bridge and so we said, 'OK. Let's flip this rock, just for the heck of it; this will be our last one.' And sure enough, that's where we got the first specimen."
The big male crayfish was twice as big as any other crayfish they had seen that day. And it had the characteristic bearded setae.
The researchers made several more trips to the area before they were able to collect enough specimens to confirm what they already suspected: The giant crayfish of Shoal Creek was a new species. They named it Barbicambarus simmonsi, in honor of the Tennessee Valley Authority scientist, Jeffrey Simmons, who had collected the first specimen.
The crayfish is the newest among more than 600 species of crayfish identified around the world.
http://www.chattanoogan.com/articles/article_192726.asp................................................
http://www.newsoxy.com/science/new-giant-species-of-crayfish-16841.html 
stupid humans....
Fri Jan 21, 2011 9:04 am
