ABSTRACT
Tadashi Kawai,1,* Gi-Sik Min,2 Evgeny Barabanshchikov,3 Vjacheslav Labay4 and Hyun Sook Ko5
For more than one hundred years, Europeans have been fascinated by oriental fauna. As a result several explorers collected freshwater crayfi shes in Far-east Asia and Siberia and brought back them into Europe. From these specimens taxonomists described four new species, Cambaroides dauricus (Pallas, 1772) (Amur basin of eastern Siberia and Northeastern China, its estuaries and the basin of the Bay of Peter the Great), C. japonicus (De Haan, 1841) (Hokkaido and Honshu islands, Japan), C. schrenckii (Kessler, 1874) (Amur and Ussury basins of Siberia and Korea, and Sakhalin Island), and C. similis (Koelbel, 1892) (Korean Peninsula) (Fitzpatrick 1995). The genus Cambaroides is quite different from its closest relative resulting in it being the only members of the subfamily Cambaroidinae. Ortman (1902) and Andrews (1907) thought that this genus is the most primitive group in the crayfi shes in the Northern Hemisphere and ancestor to European and North American crayfi shes. Subsequent studies on taxonomy and general biology of East Asian species have been reported by Okada (1933) and Koba (1939, 1941, 1942).
