Get 20M+ Full-Text Papers For Less Than $1.50/day. Start a 14-Day Trial for You or Your Team.

Learn More →

Riverine Habitat Requirements of the White–Clawed Crayfish, Austropotamobius pallipes

Riverine Habitat Requirements of the White–Clawed Crayfish, Austropotamobius pallipes Ireland remains an important refuge for the freshwater crayfish Austropotamobius pallipes . To determine factors that influence their riverine distribution, forty rivers or tributaries of rivers that flow into Upper and Lower Lough Erne were sampled and surveyed. The nineteen sites where crayfish occurred had more bedrock and moss than those without crayfish, indicating the importance of a stable substrate and an indirect source of food. A subset of these sites, for which hydrochemical data were available, showed greater water hardness where crayfish were present, indicating that a high calcium water content is important to these animals. However, neither biological water quality nor invertebrate community structure varied between sites where crayfish were present and sites where they were absent. This indicates that biological factors have little influence on the presence of crayfish in a river and that crayfish influence biological water quality to a limited degree. http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Biology and Environment: Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy Royal Irish Academy

Riverine Habitat Requirements of the White–Clawed Crayfish, Austropotamobius pallipes

Download PDF
8 pages

Loading next page...
 
/lp/royal-irish-academy/riverine-habitat-requirements-of-the-white-clawed-crayfish-nU3Yd7zvg3

References (32)

Publisher
Royal Irish Academy
Copyright
Copyright © 2006 RIA
ISSN
0791-7945
eISSN
2009-003X
DOI
10.3318/BIOE.2006.106.1.1
Publisher site
See Article on Publisher Site

Abstract

Ireland remains an important refuge for the freshwater crayfish Austropotamobius pallipes . To determine factors that influence their riverine distribution, forty rivers or tributaries of rivers that flow into Upper and Lower Lough Erne were sampled and surveyed. The nineteen sites where crayfish occurred had more bedrock and moss than those without crayfish, indicating the importance of a stable substrate and an indirect source of food. A subset of these sites, for which hydrochemical data were available, showed greater water hardness where crayfish were present, indicating that a high calcium water content is important to these animals. However, neither biological water quality nor invertebrate community structure varied between sites where crayfish were present and sites where they were absent. This indicates that biological factors have little influence on the presence of crayfish in a river and that crayfish influence biological water quality to a limited degree.

Journal

Biology and Environment: Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy – Royal Irish Academy

Published: Jan 1, 2006

There are no references for this article.