Signal Crayfish

[notbrazil]

Signal crayfish everywhere! I went for a quick scuba dive the other night in the River Dibb near Bolton Abbey and astonished to see the sheer numbers of signal crayfish on the river bed. I was at about 6m. Every rock, nook and cranny was crawling with them.

As I have a penchant for shellfish I duely removed about 20 of them in a bag and froze immmediately, aware of how they can release eggs if relocated. Maybe I need a license to do this but who cares? There were literally hundreds upon hundreds. Quite scary.

They are very agressive when approached and will nip. They can actually shoot forward and backwards in mid water making the heart skip a beat on occasion.

I have reported to EA who said that nothing much can be done, but to my knowledge the Finnish government ran a successful culling campaign to halt their spread there. Surely we can do something considering these buggers are eating fish eggs, eels, our native crayfish and can tunnel 1.5m into riverbanks causing a honeycomb effect which has collapsed banks.