TWRA Fisheries Technician and Crayfish Expert Retires

MORRISTOWN, Tenn.---A TWRA fisheries technician and self-taught crayfish biologist has retired after dedicating more than four decades to wildlife and fisheries conservation and management. 

Carl Williams began working with TWRA in August 1979 through the Young Adult Conservation Corp (YACC), a federally funded program.  Initially hired for a one-year assignment, he worked with lands management wildlife biologists on various projects, including white-tailed deer and wild turkey restoration. 

The subsequent year marked a shift as he joined TWRA’s Fisheries Division, conducting creel surveys on Cherokee and Douglas reservoirs.  In August 1981, he transitioned to the Buffalo Springs Trout Hatchery spending the next seven years propagating and rearing rainbow, brown, brook, lake, and Ohrid trout, and distributing them throughout many streams, rivers, and reservoirs in East Tennessee.  In 1988, he transferred to the newly established Stream Survey Crew, where he remained for the next 35 years assisting fisheries biologists in conducting surveys of fish and bottom dwelling organisms within East Tennessee, as well as crayfish distributions statewide. 

Williams was considered a crayfish expert by his peers and colleagues and was routinely conferred with by colleges and universities, as well as National Geographic and the "Smithsonian Museum of Natural History" .  He is also renowned for his ability to photograph crayfish with intricate detail and realism and has been painstakingly photographing crayfish for a book he is coauthoring, The Crayfish of Tennessee.  Williams’s work has directly led to the conservation of multiple endemic Tennessee crayfish species, a tremendous accolade for any biologist. 

For all his contributions and service, Williams was honored this past fall with the TWRA Fisheries Technician Lifetime Achievement Award announced during a meeting of the Tennessee Fish and Wildlife Commission . It is just the second
time the prestigious honor was presented.

TWRA Fisheries Biologist Parker Hildreth describes Williams as an “unsung conservation hero of the agency,” pointing out that he passionately went above and beyond his role to become one of the premier astacologists in North America, and a leading aquatic zoologist of the Southeast.  Hildreth goes on to say, “Though not directly taking credit, Carl has personally discovered numerous undescribed crayfish species and has laid the foundation for future crayfish conservation for years to come.”   

Region IV Fisheries Program Manager Jim Habera had the privilege of working with Williams over the past 33 years on a variety of fisheries monitoring and management projects in East Tennessee.  “The knowledge Carl acquired of Tennessee’s fish, macroinvertebrates, and particularly crayfish during that time, is unsurpassed,” says Habera.  “He is one of our state’s crayfish experts and excels at identification and photography of these important but often overlooked components of our aquatic ecosystems.  Along with his considerable knowledge, Carl’s dedication, dependability, and quick wit made him a pleasure to work with and an integral part of Region IV’s fisheries program during his long career.” 

---TWRA---