ABSTRACT
Why do we study crayfi sh? Answers may range from their cultural or economic value (Jones et al. 2006) to ecological importance (Usio and Townsend 2004) to the high conservation need of many species (Taylor et al. 2007). Alternatively, one justifi cation for the emergence of crayfi sh as model organisms (e.g., Crandall 2000) has been their ubiquity and ease of collection relative to a rewarding range of biological insights. For example, Thomas Henry Huxley (1884) in his introduction to the study of zoology framed his book around crayfi sh in part because the “[the crayfi sh] is readily obtained.” Yet those of us who need to quantitatively sample crayfi sh recognize that “readily obtained” does not necessarily translate into representative of broader populations or communities. Huxley (1884) might be countered by observations like those of Rabeni et al. (1997), who note that no crayfi sh sampling method is without biases that may misrepresent attributes ranging from relative abundance to size and age structure of populations. Ultimately, quantitative sampling for crayfi sh presents a number of challenges to confound even the most experienced of fi eld biologists.
