When Dr Susan Lawler joined La Trobe University, with a doctorate in evolutionary genetics from Washington University, she discovered that Victoria was a hot spot for crayfish. To her surprise she found that scientists had conducted very little research into these intriguing freshwater crustaceans. Almost two decades later, still fascinated by the creatures, she continues her self-confessed 'romance'. She even keeps her favourite specimens as pets!

Dr Susan Lawler
My primary interest is in saving endangered or threatened species and I've been focussing on the fresh water crayfish of Australia for some years now.

I actually did my PhD on fruit flies so I wasn't a crayfish enthusiast from the beginning but when I was moving to Australia to work at La Trobe University for the first time, I had a colleague in America who was passionate about crayfish and he said, 'Do you know where you're going? It is the coolest place on earth for crayfish'.

Crayfish had a lot of really cool traits. They're absolutely covered with sensory information. They've got their antenna, they can smell what is happening in the water, they can smell a predator, they can smell if another crayfish is unhappy.

They have personalities. Most people don't know this. They make great pets of course. Our current crayfish name is Swampy. He's a swamp yabby. Crayfish aren't really cuddly but I find them really quite friendly. Yeah they'll, they'll take your finger off if you give them a chance but then that would be your fault, not theirs.

Different species have different temperaments. The small ones that we dig up out of burrows, they're unafraid of you completely and they will just walk over your hand and they're just calm as can be. Whereas the swamp yabby, they're quite aggressive. I've pulled them out and put them both in the same bucket and the swamp yabby goes the, the normal yabby pretty quick and cuts him in half and it's nasty.

I think that I'm watching a very interesting period of crayfish change in their distributions. The Murray crayfish which we're quite concerned about used to be common in South Australia, it used to be common in Mildura and now you can't find them in either of those places.

We don't know about where the young, where the juveniles live or how they move from the mother into the habitat so the first three or four years in their life are a complete mystery to us and if we're going to help them, we need to know something about that.

You see the fuzz growing on him? He's got kind of a ... it's plankton. It's quite natural and when you catch a swamp yabby in the wild they've got all of that sort of growing on them as well.

Being able to do a really good job of research while doing a good job of teaching can sometimes be challenging but some of my best researches happened with the help of research students.

This little fellow came from Murchison and he's my family pet.

There are students who were not interested in my class until we went out and dug up a crayfish and suddenly they became very interested.

What they do is they actually ...

There's something about crayfish that takes us back to our childhood. They're really sort of primal and they stir up emotions somehow. I don't think I'm more obsessed with crayfish than any other researcher is with their organism. They certainly have snuck into my psyche and I do dream about them. And I worry about them. And I love them very much.

Story Contacts

Dr Susan Lawler
Head of Department/Senior Lecturer
School of Life Sciences
La Trobe University

Related Info

Crayfish World

Native Fish Australia

Murray-Darling Basin Authority

Murray-Darling Basin Authority: Native Fish Strategy

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