''Paranephrops planifrons'' is a species of southern

crawfish 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 The Parastacidae are the family of freshwater crayfish found in the Southern Hemisphere. The family is a classic Gondwana-distributed taxon, with extant members in South America, Madagascar, Australia, New Zealand, and New Guinea, and extinct ta ...

. It is found in

New Zealand New Zealand ( mi, Aotearoa ) is an island country in the southwestern Pacific Ocean. It consists of two main landmasses—the North Island () and the South Island ()—and over 700 smaller islands. It is the sixth-largest island count ...

. ''P. planifrons'' is one of two indigenous species of freshwater crayfish found in New Zealand. They are more commonly found in the

North Island The North Island, also officially named Te Ika-a-Māui, is one of the two main islands of New Zealand, separated from the larger but much less populous South Island by the Cook Strait. The island's area is , making it the world's 14th-largest ...

and the West Coast of the

South Island The South Island, also officially named , is the larger of the two major islands of New Zealand in surface area, the other being the smaller but more populous North Island. It is bordered to the north by Cook Strait, to the west by the Tasman ...

while the ''P. zealandicus'' is found in the east and south of the South Island. Both species of ''Paranephrops'' are important resources to the indigenous

Māori Māori or Maori can refer to: Relating to the Māori people * Māori people of New Zealand, or members of that group * Māori language, the language of the Māori people of New Zealand * Māori culture * Cook Islanders, the Māori people of the C ...

, particularly in the Te Arawa and

Lake Taupō Lake Taupō (also spelled Taupo; mi, Taupō-nui-a-Tia or ) is a large crater lake in New Zealand's North Island, located in the caldera of the Taupō Volcano. The lake is the namesake of the town of Taupō, which sits on a bay in the lake's nor ...

regions. The International Union for Conservation of Nature's conservation status of ''P. planifrons'' is "LC",

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 ...

, with no immediate threat to the species' survival.

References

Further reading