Critically Endangered
Orconectes sheltae
Orconectes sheltae
Orconectes sheltae, the Shelta Cave crayfish, is a small, freshwater crayfish endemic to Alabama in the United States.
The crayfish
Orconectes sheltae is a crayfish in the family Cambaridae (order Decapoda).
Range and habitat
Orconectes sheltae, the Shelta Cave crayfish, is a small, freshwater crayfish endemic to Alabama in the United States.
Pins are Wikidata “endemic to” fields. Orange dots, when present, are GBIF occurrence tiles — survey bias included.
Diet
Crayfishes hide under rock or in burrows and feed as omnivores. Stream species need cold, oxygenated water and an intact bank.
Freshwater crayfishes and crabs walk the bed. Dams, silt, and introduced species cut a drainage into fragments they cannot cross.
In crisis
The last cave survey to successfully locate the species was in 1988, and therefore it was considered as being extinct for over 30 years until its rediscovery in 2019.
Orconectes sheltae is Critically Endangered on this catalog because that is the IUCN category stored on Wikidata. Confirm the official criteria and any later count on iucnredlist.org.
Sources
Written for this catalog from the English Wikipedia article on Orconectes sheltae, Wikidata item Q4483225. Family and order context is original field-guide writing about the group, not a copied assessment of this one species. Wikipedia text is CC BY-SA. Not an IUCN assessment. Counts, when quoted, can change — confirm them on the recovery programme and on iucnredlist.org.
