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Efforts to Protect Panama City Crayfish Moving Forward: Mission: Mudbugs

Posted on: Sunday, 11 June 2006, 15:00 CDT

By Faith Ford, The News Herald, Panama City, Fla.

Jun. 11--It might have been easier to fight for a fuzzy mammal or a majestic bird. Brown and about 2-inches long with antennae, eight legs, blackbead eyes and a pair of claws, the Panama City crayfish is a mud dweller that spends most of its time escaping scrutiny one to three feet beneath the surface. It's not graceful, handsome or even cute.

But the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission is priming the homely crustacean to join the ranks of the beloved loggerhead sea turtle and Florida black bear. On Wednesday, commission members voted in favor of placing the crayfish on the state's threatened species list.

"It is sometimes frustrating that people sometimes don't understand the importance of saving such a creature. That's the reality," said Lisa Keppner, a local biologist, who alongside her biologist husband, Ed, has led the effort to reclassify the Panama City crayfish from a species of special concern to threatened.

"This is a rare species," Ed Keppner said. "It's part of our ecosystem. It has a function in our ecosystem. Why should we not protect it ?" The beginning

Tallahassee scientist Horton Hobbs discovered the Panama City crayfish on a collecting expedition in 1938. The species was described in a 1942 report, but largely was ignored, Ed Keppner said, until the 1980s when an FWC biologist searched and rediscovered the creature known to live only in Bay County. In 1987, the Panama City crayfish was listed by the state as a species of special concern, one step below threatened and two from endangered.

Then working for the National Marine Fisheries Service, Ed Keppner told himself he would hunt for the Panama City crayfish after retirement. The interest, he said, goes back to a childhood in Illinois, where he and friends used chicken parts to fish ponds for crayfish.

Lisa Keppner was skeptical, but in 2000 the pair set out and she netted a crayfish on her second sweep, according to their account.

"She said, 'I got one. I got one,'" Ed Keppner recalled.

They suspected it was the elusive Panama City crayfish, and a Florida Museum of Natural History representative, the Keppners said, confirmed it.

"That spurred us on," Ed Keppner said.

From there, the couple completed a patchy survey of ditches along U.S. 231 and other spots where the crayfish was suspected to live.

In dry weather, the crayfish burrows down to the water table about one to three feet under the ground. It surfaces during rainy periods and can be found in roadside ditches and other places where water pools.

In their initial survey, the Keppners found the crayfish in 26 locations.

"A lot of construction was proposed in those ditches," Ed Keppner said. "Nobody had the time or the staff to really get into that thing -- a lowly little mudbug." Defining habitat

The Keppners in 2001 petitioned the FWC to reclassify the crayfish. A Biological Status Report prepared by the agency recommended that the species be reclassified, but the FWC was reviewing its listing process and non-emergency actions were delayed until 2005.

Meanwhile, the Keppners wanted to nail down the perimeters of the crayfish habitat. They wrote a letter to The St. Joe Co. requesting permission to access lands where they believed the creature was living. The company paid for the research, Ed Keppner said.

The couple surveyed 20.5 square miles in 2003 and 2004, encountering rattlesnakes and water moccasins, among other wildlife, as they pushed through thick vegetation.

More than a half-century ago, Hobbs projected the crayfish inhabited a 200-square-mile area bordered by St. Andrew Bay on the north, west and south. The Keppners' research indicates a much smaller range of about 50 square miles with the greatest concentration near Star Avenue in the Callaway area.

The crayfish lives beneath power lines and in roadside ditches in open areas with wetland soils and herbaceous vegetation. Naturally occurring forest fires that cleared out brush and kept an open canopy maintained its natural habitat at one time, said Patty Kelly, an endangered species biologist with the Panama City office of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

"It depended on fire to keep the vegetation open," Kelly said. "The kind of habitat it likes is dependent on fire, and it's very hard to be able to burn in a city area."

Farming also has contributed to the crayfish's decline, Kelly said, on top of increasing development.

"There's a tremendous amount of development in the Panama City area and that is the only place where it occurs," Kelly said. "It's such a small area with a high amount of development with residential housing and industry." Getting protection

Rather than going through a federal listing process, the Fish and Wildlife Service is working with the St. Joe Co. and other entities to form a candidate conservation agreement, or CCA.

"We're sort of bypassing the listing and going right towards recovery," Kelly said. "Often times when the state already has state protection, if we can work with the state and other landowners, we'd rather just go ahead and recover the species than go through the long paperwork process."

A CCA is a non-binding agreement with parties consenting to follow a management plan.

"It's just sort of a friendly, let's all get together and do something good," Kelly said.

Beyond a CCA, landowners can enter a candidate conservation agreement with assurances, or CCAA. The assurances mean that landowners are required to follow a management plan and in turn will not be held to higher standards if the species is later listed as federally protected.

Jorge Gonzalez, director of planning for The St. Joe Co., said an agreement should be reached within a few months. Discussions are still ongoing on whether the company will enter a CCA or CCAA, he said.

"The unique thing about these agreements, I don't think there's been any done in this region," Gonzalez said. "We're all still learning all the subtleties of it."

As part of the agreement, the company is planning to designate about 2,000 acres in the Star Avenue area off U.S. 231 and north of State 22 for crayfish conservation. The woods would be managed with thinning and burning to create a more natural habitat.

Aside from benefiting the crayfish, Gonzalez said, the agreement would work to the company's benefit.

"Coming up with these types of agreements early on, it gives us more predictability on where we might be able to develop, where we should develop, instead of leaving it to an ad hoc permit type of process," Gonzalez said.

Kelly said negotiations on the agreement have been ongoing for about two years.

"It seems like a long time," she said. "But really, to recover a species, we have a lot of species that have been listed and they haven't been recovered in 20 years.

"Two years is really just a blink to recovering that species if we get to that goal we're hoping."

On a state level, a new management plan will be developed following the FWC decision last week. The species cannot be relisted until the commission accepts the plan. Ed Keppner said he expects whatever agreement The St. Joe Co. and the federal Fish and Wildlife Service come to will be part of that plan.

With that in place, he said, "I think it will be around for a long, long time."

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Copyright (c) 2006, The News Herald, Panama City, Fla.

Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News.

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Source: The News Herald

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