7^. a^^S Vol. 81, pp. 11-22 X -"-'^^ /•■ .., J April 30, 1968 PROCEEDINGS OF THE BIOLOGICAL SOCIETY OF WASHINGTON A NEW GENUS AND SPECIES OF CRAWFISH FROM THE SOUTHEASTERN UNITED STATES (DECAPODA, ASTACIDAE)! By J. F. FiTZPATEiCK, Jr., and James F. Payne Department of Zoology, Mississippi State University, State College 39762 Taxonomically, the crawfishes assigned to the North Amer-ican genus Cambarus have been recognized as the most dif-ficult of the Cambarine, and remarkable convergence of morphological form among them has caused students to make tenuous assignments of relationships. The new species de-scribed below has as its closest relatives the members of the Cristatus Section (Hobbs, 1955:98) of the genus Cambarus: C. cristatus Hobbs (1955:95), C. prom,inens Hobbs (1966: 110) and C. valleculus Fitzpatrick (1967:163). Further, this new species provides information explaining the "distant rela-tionships" ( see below ) of the members of the Cristatus Section to other members of Cambarus. This new crawfish could, on the basis of gonopodal charac-ters and those of the annulus ventralis, be assigned to the Limosus Section (Ortmann, 1905:108) of the genus Orcon-ectes; however, it shares many more characters with the members of the Cristatus Section (Hobbs, 1955:98) of the genus Cambarus. Among these characters are the broad antennal scale, the short-fingered chela with a cristiform row of tubercles along the inner margin of the palm, and features of the carapace which do not exist in any member of the genus Orconectes. Only in the two members of the genus Faxonella (Creaser, 1933:21) and in the members of the Barbatus (Hobbs, 1942:35) and Planirostris (Penn, 1953:75) 1 Supported in part by NSF Grant GB-4719 to the senior author. 2— Proc. Biol. Soc. Wash., Vol. 81, 1968 (11)
BioStor
