Summary: <p>Hello from Finland! While I’m far from home, I’m thinking of animals of my native land. So join me to learn about crawdads (aka crayfish aka crawfish aka freshwater lobsters aka everything) and cicadas!</p> <p><img class="alignnone size-medium wp-image-274" src="http://strangeanimalspodcast.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/bluecrayfish-300x200.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="200"></p> <p>A lovely blue crayfish from Indonesia</p> <p><img class="alignnone size-medium wp-image-275" src="http://strangeanimalspodcast.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/crayfishdefensecrawfish-300x289.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="289"></p> <p>Fite me</p> <p><img class="alignnone size-medium wp-image-276" src="http://strangeanimalspodcast.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/Giant_tasmanian_crayfish_www.allphotoz.blogspot.com_04-300x285.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="285"></p> <p>The giant Tasmanian crayfish</p> <p><img class="alignnone size-medium wp-image-277" src="http://strangeanimalspodcast.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/periodical_cicada_brood_xxiii_jess-300x206.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="206"></p> <p>A periodical cicada.</p> <p><img class="alignnone size-medium wp-image-278" src="http://strangeanimalspodcast.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/ck-cicada_thumb-300x163.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="163"></p> <p>A cicada killer about to do horrible things to a cicada. Nature is disgusting.</p> <p>Show transcript:</p> <p>Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw.</p> <p>For this week’s episode, which I’m putting together right before I leave for Finland on a madcap two-week adventure—okay, two weeks staying in the city of Helsinki while attending a conference and eating a lot of pastries—I’m going to look at two invertebrates that live close to home. The first is the crawdad. I’ve always wondered if those muddy holes near creeks and streams that we call crawdad holes around here are actually crawdad holes. Sometimes they’re nowhere near water. So I looked it up.</p> <p>Yes, they are actually holes dug by crawdads. So that’s one mystery solved. The crawdad has a lot of different names depending on where you live: crayfish, crawfish, mountain lobsters, freshwater lobsters, mudbugs, and many other names. In Australia they may be called yabbies. There are a lot of species throughout the world, most of them in North America. Some also live in South America, Australia, New Zealand, Madagascar, Japan, and Europe. In fact, they live everywhere except Africa and Antarctica.</p>
