''Engaewa similis'' is a species of

Australia Australia, officially the Commonwealth of Australia, is a Sovereign state, sovereign country comprising the mainland of the Australia (continent), Australian continent, the island of Tasmania, and numerous List of islands of Australia, sma ...

crayfish Crayfish are freshwater crustaceans belonging to the clade Astacidea, which also contains lobsters. In some locations, they are also known as crawfish, craydids, crawdaddies, crawdads, freshwater lobsters, mountain lobsters, rock lobsters, mu ...

in the family Parastacidae.

Distribution and conservation

''E. similis'' is

endemic Endemism is the state of a species being found in a single defined geographic location, such as an island, state, nation, country or other defined zone; organisms that are indigenous to a place are not endemic to it if they are also found elsew ...

to the Augusta region in

Western Australia Western Australia (commonly abbreviated as WA) is a state of Australia occupying the western percent of the land area of Australia excluding external territories. It is bounded by the Indian Ocean to the north and west, the Southern Ocean to th ...

, and can be found from the Margaret River to the vicinity of

Windy Harbour Windy Harbour is a holiday settlement surrounded by D’Entrecasteaux National Park. It is located 27 km south of Northcliffe, on the south coast of Western Australia east of Augusta and west of Nornalup. It lies just east of Point D' ...

. Although previously considered an

endangered species An endangered species is a species that is very likely to become extinct in the near future, either worldwide or in a particular political jurisdiction. Endangered species may be at risk due to factors such as habitat loss, poaching and inv ...

, ''E. similis'' is now listed as a species of

Least Concern A least-concern species is a species that has been categorized by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) as evaluated as not being a focus of species conservation because the specific species is still plentiful in the wild. T ...

on the

IUCN Red List The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List of Threatened Species, also known as the IUCN Red List or Red Data Book, founded in 1964, is the world's most comprehensive inventory of the global conservation status of biol ...

, since it is abundant at the sites where it persists.

Description

An adult female

holotype A holotype is a single physical example (or illustration) of an organism, known to have been used when the species (or lower-ranked taxon) was formally described. It is either the single such physical example (or illustration) or one of several ...

(a single physical example of the species) was found in

Augusta, Western Australia Augusta is a town on the south-west coast of Western Australia, where the Blackwood River emerges into Flinders Bay. It is the nearest town to Cape Leeuwin, on the furthest southwest corner of the Australian continent. In the it had a populat ...

by L. P. Smith in 1961. In 1967, E. F. Riek gave detailed description of the holotype, held at the Western Australian Museum; it was long (

cephalothorax The cephalothorax, also called prosoma in some groups, is a tagma of various arthropods, comprising the head and the thorax fused together, as distinct from the abdomen behind. (The terms ''prosoma'' and ''opisthosoma'' are equivalent to ''cepha ...

), with a blue colour on the chela, and was similar to '' Engaewa reducta'' apart from the shape of the rostrum, the structure of the chela and the shape of the

telson The telson () is the posterior-most division of the body of an arthropod. Depending on the definition, the telson is either considered to be the final segment of the arthropod body, or an additional division that is not a true segment on accou ...

and

uropod Uropods are posterior appendages found on a wide variety of crustaceans. They typically have functions in locomotion. Definition Uropods are often defined as the appendages of the last body segment of a crustacean. An alternative definition sugge ...

References

{{Taxonbar, from=Q4847683 Parastacidae Freshwater crustaceans of Australia Endangered fauna of Australia Taxonomy articles created by Polbot Crustaceans described in 1967