signal crayfish

[jordan,renton]

shall i ask him where to get a licence or is that a place to go crayfishing

[jordan,renton]

enyone there

[Marineboy]

Hopefully you will get further than I have so far. That number should get through to your local officer who should be able to advise on the local situation and places to trap. I tried my local ones and am none the wiser.
The EA do not seem to take the interest or the problem seriously enough. How many people I wonder are thinking of quietly farming their own in their garden ponds instead of banging their heads on the EA wall?

From my own observations, there are many more males than females - or is this just a local situation? Has anyone possibly even remotely interested why this might be, and whether it could be a route for future control of these creatures?
So how do you sex a crayfish? I feel another thread coming on . . . . . . .

[jordan,renton]

um mabie the male's eat the female's i might do some reserch on that if i have eny luck i fink the WAB should do there own canpain on this and try to find out more about signal crayfish

[m1.carson]

Hi People,

There's an enoooouuurmouse post about this already, think it was called "signal crayfish in Yorkshire" or similar, if you have a read through that you should be more confused than you are now.

Max.

Yep, search waterlife forum for "signal crayfish in yorkshire" and there's 6 pages of it.

[jordan,renton]

cool thanks

[conkers]

hi i am looking for some where to go with my daughter to fish for crayfish. i live in northamptonshire. do you mind telling me where the lake you refer to is? thanks

[streuthmonkey]

I have just spent about a week trying to get a license to trap Signal crayfish in my local river, the Wellow Brook in the Bristol catchment.

After all the fuss of finding and contacting the landowners I applied for the license on line. After a few days the Environment Agency got back to me and said that I cannot trap them in all the rivers in the Bristol catchment but can do so in closed waters. I am really dissapointed but the EA says the reason I can't is because taking the big ones out actually increases the rate of spread and these are generally the ones that get caught if you do it on a small scale..

So, if you live in the Bristol catchment, don't even bother applying for a license.

I am going to have to wait until the EA have allowed the white clawed crayfish to be entirely wiped out due to their inaction. Their poilicy seems to be to do nothing and wait in the hope that an effective pheromone gets developed before the white claws go extinct in Britain.

I can fully understand why there is such a problem with illegal trapping, on the one hand we have the EA and various other groups trying to promote Signal Crayfish trapping, and on the other hand the EA are providing inadequate information on their site about where you can catch them and making it a major chore to even apply for a license, which you need to do just to find out if you can trap or not . If I hadn't been brought up by environmetally minded people, (my mum is chair of the local wildlife group and my dad is actively involved too as well as having a BSc in Rural Environmental Studies), I would probably have just gone and trapped illegally after seeing how much effort it was going to be to apply for a license. The least the EA could do is provide applicants with details of the land owners, which they no doubt have a database of, or change their forms so you can apply for a license for a place on a river without having to find out who the land owners are, which can be done afterwards when you know you can trap there.