This is the picture. The burrow was found in a garden in the South of Spain, in open, sandy soil. Anyone know what beastie could have made it?
Looks like a crayfish hole, of which Spain has plenty. (Cangrejos de rio)
But the garden lies several miles away from the sea.
Crayfish are, generally, freshwater animals. The marine forms are usually called lobsters. Lots of exceptions to this rule of course., but you certainly don’t need to be anywhere near the sea to find crayfish.
Hmm, interesting. Those could very well be it. I would never have thought about that!
Had burrows like that in my backyard in Middle Tennessee.
Crayfish/crawdads, yup.
Subterranian (SP?) ground water lets em live.
My late cat, Clapton, used to go fishing for them. Caught a few, too, & ate them with obvious relish.
As opposed to surface or aerial ground water?
I thought catswere allergic to relish.
A poster here a couple years ago had random clumps of corn die. On a rainy day with standing water she saw holes that air came out of by the dead plants. The field had a creek nearby. The crayfish had burrowed into the ground and killed the corn plants in the field.
Not likely.
Maize won’t tolerate waterlogged soil, which crayfish require to survive. IOW the maize died because the ground became waterlogged and killed the maize, and then the crayfish moved in, and she blamed tyhe crayfish for the death of the maize.
I’m not sure what mechnzism would actually allow a crayfish to kill a maize plant. They don’t excavate extensively enough to cause sufficient root disturbance to kill the plant, and they don’t suck sap, so it’s hard to see how she thought they might have killed her plants.
Woulda been better boiled, with corn on the cob, 'taters, and beer. Or fried and served in a po-boy. Etc.
They can live quite far away from water. I used to “fish” for them in the storm drain around my grandmother’s house. No lakes or rivers anywhere near.
Amazing. For some reason the image of a crayfish scutting along underneath swaying cornstalks is hilarious.
The creek was well below the field level so the ground wasn’t water logged. It did happen, so if you don’t believe it too bad. It took a while to find the problem it was so bizarre an occurrence.
Do you have cicada in that area? It looks a lot like the burrows cicada wasps make in my garden. They are these huge, wasp/fly type insects that like to sit close to their nests.
I lived in Towson, Md., with a very small creek running behind our house and we had a bunch of crawdads back there; made holes just like the photo. I was 10 and didn’t know you could eat them, although I never saw enough to make a plateful.
Oh, I believe the corn died and there were crawdads, but beware of the fallacy of cause and effect. Maybe we could conclude that dying corn plants attract crawdads?
The plants were only extremely sick at the time of the thread. The water washed down the holes and into the creek bed. The thread.
It’s a shame that Beaucarnea stopped using this board.
Wikipedia says they will eat plant material, so maybe, yes. In fact, right where the burrow is, recently a big tree was felled and it is quite possible its roots are rotting in the ground, providing such food.
I thinkt the hole is too big for a cicada.
S/he didn’t say cicada. S/he said cicada wasp. These are, as the poster said, gigantic wasps. I’ve seen them 3"-4" long. Big enough to land on a cicada, sting him to death, and then pick him up and fly him to the burrow - which they do. (and then the wasps lay eggs on the cicadas and the larvae feed on the carcass.) So although I also take the picture in the OP to be a crayfish hole, cicada wasps have to have mighty large entranceways to their burrows.
Aargh! Another critter I never heard of before. And what a f*ing monster it is! Well, There is one species in Spain, so it could be. Wikipedia doens’t have much on their burrows, so I will have to look further.
I really hope it’s a crayfish. 
Thanks!
You don’t seem to understand that you don’t need a creek for soil to be water logged. Or else you don’t understand that the relative level of the drainage line has nothing whatsoever to do with the height of the water table.
If there was, as you claim “standing water” on a “rainy day” then the soil was, by definition, waterlogged. That’s what waterlogged means: all the pore spaces in the soil are filled with water. If the pore spaces were not filled then water could not be standing on the surface.
Maize can be killed by waterlogging within 24 hours. If there was standing water on the surface as a result of rain then there are one of two possibilities. Either the soil was already waterlogged and a brief shower brought the water table to the surface, or there was a prolonged period of rainfall which caused the water table to rise over a period of days. Either way the crop was almost certainly waterlogged for several days and we need look for no other cause of plant death. If you see standing water in your maize field then it’s a safe bet it’s going to be followed by plant deaths.
Since we are here for factual answers please provide your evidence that the crayfish killed these plants, rather than the more probable and proven cause of having a water table above ground level; you know, waterlogged soil.
Good to see the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy is alive and well in rural America.
My maize died.
I saw crayfish.
The crayfish must have caused the maize death.
Never mind the fact that you admit the crayfish were only seen because there was freakin’ standing water over the entire field. That degree of waterlogging couldn’t possibly have played a role, despite the fact that maize is notoriously sensitive to waterlogging. Nope, must have been them damn crawdads. They couldn’t have coincidentally been there because they require waterlogged soils to survive, you know, the same waterlogged soils that are lethal to maize plants.
Nope, I saw them after the plants dies, so they must have caused the deaths.