Around 40 per cent of the remaining native white-clawed crayfish population in England could be wiped out in a year after experts confirmed a deadly plague has been found in one of their strongest surviving populations.
@Tony Gonzalez That sounds positively decent.. Crayfish Mexican food... that's a first for me..Freshwater Crayfish in Australia cost a fortune and hard to find. To kill them we don't boil them. We split them (while alive) down the middle with a large knife and then BBQ them after painting them with garlic butter and chive sauce
Hell yeah, a lot of smaller brands have been popping up in Louisiana as well. The powder is great, but throw in some of the liquid stuff in there as well, whew, that's good eating yeah.
guy c that’s insane! We have invasive species here such as feral hogs. A real problem. You do need a hunting license which is about 40 dollars but if you have landowner permission you can harvest them until you are sick of them. They actually shoot them from helicopters here. They visit my property in the winter and we trap and harvest all we care to eat. As a landowner I don’t even need to buy the hunting license. Just shoot the silly things.
We also have the Nutria rat. Big ugly thing but actually fairly good to eat. Sounds bad but I actually prefer it over chicken. Some folks call it a Coypu. About 8 kilos we harvested them for fur and dog food when I was younger.
guy c we fed a lot of feral pigs to the dogs. A lot of people shoot them, especially the big males, and leave them in the field. They are a real danger and do millions of dollars in damage. We eat crawfish by the tons here. They are farmed intensively here. Different species but still delicious. Nearly every weekend in the spring we have a crawfish boil at a friends house and eat. It’s a pretty small party that only boils 100 pounds of them. It’s a little harder to get people to eat the Nutria but fairly locally there is a festival that specializes in serving it. Good luck with changing government policy!
Michael Byrnes I agree, I live in the UK and I would love to help stop them and get a tasty meal out of it. There are lots of homeless shelters and people are increasingly relying on food banks. It would be great to kill two birds with one stone. I bought a crayfish trap a while back but I couldn't work out if I was allowed to use it so it has been gathering dust in the garage. someone told me that I would need training and a lisence but I couldn't work out how to get them at the time as there wasn't much information and what I could find was often different from one site to the next. I don't want to cause more harm to the environment by doing something without the proper know how and I don't want to break the law by setting a trap somewhere that I am not meant to. It is entirely possible that better information is now available, I will have to have another look. If it was clear where to find all of the relevant information then I am sure allot more people would be trapping them to eat. it would be great if the environment agency could work with local groups to target these tasty invaders.
@@stevekilpatrick7105 I don't know. But the way they throwing around anti-semitism these days, exclusively to attack human rights defenders, the way they're using liberal to define neoliberals, the way they're using "left" to define centrists, it's lookin like a lot of words gonna loose all meaning.
@@unhappyallthetime8445 Are you implying that the anti-Corbynist wing of the Parliamentary Labour Party are "of the left", or are you one of those "freedom" lovers who think that Obamacare was a communist plot to steal a slice of your Mom's apple pie?
True enough. It seems the best way to wipe out a species is to make it legal to hunt/catch them. And I have to ask, how the hell did these things "escape" the project?
I'm with you , make a local competition and see who can get the most of them before there breeding season and during . Idk that guys crayfish trap seemed pretty low maintenance to me , make a festival out of it , come on now be british or whatnot make crayfish finger food for tea time . All the cool kids are doing it :p !
I thought the same before i red yor comment. OR, $10 (euro or whatever) bounty on each one. Immediately it'll be an endangered species. They'll import them from the U.S. for 10 a piece.
Will Holly 10 dollars for a cray? Pfffffft. Catch several pounds of em, boil, crush, cream. Got yerself a tasty spread for bread and sushi and other amazing things.
lol its somehow US's fault they were accidentally introduced? but good luck getting millions of people for months to pick out crayfish to help their ecosystem because they can do the damage but people aren't good at taking blame let alone helping at all. just like how your dumb comment doesn't help anyone
No different than the Asian carp Asians said eat them we said hell no . I say can them carp up sell it as Midwestern mountain Tuna- Hell do that with the crayfish you aren't going to eradicate them so Can them sell them make money off them .
Mother nature is a prime example of what can go wrong when you introduce a foreign species , this holds truth for mankind when you open the door for foreigners from another country . They can destroy your land and way of life in know time at all .
What do you mean open the door? American Indians, Australian aborigines, New Zealand Maori, Polynesians etc had their lands INVADED by the filthy British. Hundreds of cultures lost and thousands of people dead, no one opened a door for Brittania.
Here in Texas sometimes when our pond dries due to drought it will stay dry for years and it is HOT and you'd think nothing would be able to survive those hellish conditions but you'd be wrong, if you start digging you'll find them and they'll be fat and happy as if nothing bad is happening. They are the perfect plague.
They grow it off season with cranberries in the south east it’s work perfect with the berries and they only flood the berries before harvest and that when the crawfish come out of the dry ground in tunnels. Strange but ithere a tube about it.
I wish there was a market for wild caught signal crayfish in the UK. I’ve never eaten crayfish before but I have had lobster, and I think crayfish tastes similar to lobster.
Me and my brothers spent countless hours chasing mud bugs in the creeks around our place. And we couldn't wait for the crawfish boils our family had. Family, music and food. Good times.
Introduced to England because the native species was being decimated by a crawfish plague, it was later found the Signal Crawfish was a carrier of that same disease. This is a perfect example of how to not solve a problem but instead make it worse.
0:08 looks like there used to be a thick forest there, cut down for ship building to try to build an empire. Now it looks desolate. Should have kept the forest.
Yes exactly. They cut down all the forests, killed all the predators who would eat these crayfish, and now the fishermen are whining about having no fish because of the crayfish that THEY introduced. Brits have absolutely zero common sense or respect for the land.
+cameron sheehan see you people in Texas know whats good and know what your doing hahah use British just don't understand the fun and taste `of doing it ahahah
+Declan Morland sorry about the horrible grammar I was half asleep at 3am typing that lol. Àlot of people don't like them because they say it's to much work for so little meat. The best part is getting down and dirty and diving right in. We are about to have another boil next weekend. From april-june we live off these guys here in the south.
+Declan Morland don't get me wrong my family lives in Manchester city and Liverpool so I know you guys have good cuisine but it can be bland sometimes because you guys just started the whole big culinary for taste in the last 20 years or so.
AlbertLloydy since they aren't native there, it doesn't matter when they go extinct over there, actually it would be better for the local eco system. They just shouldn't go extinct in their native eco system, since that could cause issues
blah blah gofuckurselfgoogle uhm... How about learning what an eco system is, how it works, then think for a second what people here are talking about, instead of trying to connect knowledge with wherever you come from?
If you put crawfish seasoning on dogshit it would be delicious! Crawfish probably do not taste that good but with all the Louisiana spices it tricks my brain pretty well!
Have at it and tell us what you think. They are much like lobster and need nothing more than seasoning and maybe some butter but they are great in cajun cooking. For a country that puts fucking beans on toast this is a downright delicacy. Oh and dont get me going about black and white pudding. Gag
Eat them. Turn this issues into a profitable business for the local fishermen/women. Pay them a few cents each that they catch. Sell them to restaurants or at local farmers markets. Make a market for these creatures.
Lion fish and tilapia are introduced and are delicious. Tilapia Is not spectacular but cheap and ok, lion fish are a favorite in some Florida restaurants. Divers hunt them with spear guns.
klayofthemystics native crayfish, native fish, native frogs. They are adapted to live together. We have different species, not adapted to live with larger, more aggressive US crayfish.
The point isn't wheather they're tasty or not, it's that they kill all of the other species present whereever they're present. The point isn't the food value, its that they destory the beauty that is the British countryside.
You are right Dodge. However. Just the same the US is being invaded by an Asian carp. They are eating and destroying our fresh waterways.We cant stop them but we can slow or even stop their progression by making cat food or even eating them ourselves..They like the crayfish are a delightful dish but are a curse to us just like the crayfish are to you.
Now you Pommies know how we feel in Australia! You filled us up with foxes, rabbits, carp, cat’s, rats and blackberries. Plus more than i care to remember. It’s not nice is it. 👍🏻🇦🇺
@@deanmullen1882 there you go with a typical English Empire mentality. If there’s someone already living on an island you can’t of found it, someone beat you by about 60 Thousand years. 👍🏻🇦🇺
An overwhelming source of "food" that you arent legally allowed to catch in general and that is full of disease and so killing off many native species. Sounds like a perfectly reasonable reason to be upset to me :D.
No, transmission from creature to creature is also a way. And is the case here. Signal crayfish are carriers for a number of diseases, the most important one is known as Crayfish plague, which is an infectious mold. It kills off other crustaceans and has near wiped out native crayfish. Which is kind of ironic considering that the reason they're even here is because we introduced them, not knowing they were carriers of this disease, after an outbreak of this same disease massively knocked our local populations down. At the time we didnt understand things like disease carrying and invasive species.
Seems to be a trend. Dominant species (us) introduce them (or anything else for that matter like asian carp, zebra muscles) for what ever reason. Only to find they explode and take over.
Twice I've applied for a licence to take and keep (kill) signal crayfish and been ignored both times. It appears that if the authorities issue a licence then they need to employ bailiffs to monitor them. That costs money so they would rather have these crayfish obliterate fisheries.
Usual bureaucratic B.S. and a manufactured problem. No one wants the peasants to have access to free food even if it's a "plague". God forbid it would be unregulated. People should stay in their breeding boxes watching propaganda on telly,not gadding about the countryside chasing freshwater lobsters for free. Where's the tax in that?
To solve the problem, you must unleash the most deadly predator on the planet, MAN!! Start catching and eating these delicious creatures and there will be no problem.
alex smith if the government will allow the public to make financial gain from trapping and eating of crayfish, then your problem is solved. I am a avid hunter, fisherman, and conservationist from America. We, unfortunately, managed to wipe out 25 to 30 million American bison in 100 years. Thank goodness we came to our senses on one of our indigenous animals. Since these crayfish are a ferrel animal in the UK, unleash that power on their population and you will be amazed how humans can decimate a population.
trapping them would reduce numbers, but i don't think it is going to solve the problem. these guys are small and breed quick. removing such a small animal is very hard. it is probably impossible to catch them all. plus, there is a fear that people would accidentally catch and eat native crayfish. they can't even get walking catfish out of Florida (and it's a much bigger animal)
Alex Smith, you will never be able to fully eradicate them. Eating them down to small numbers is the only hope you really have. As for the native white claw, that's an easy fix. Set laws and regulations that make sure people are able to identify the ONE species of native crayfish and anything that doesn't look like the native must be one of the countless invasives. I'm not even from there and after doing 2 min of research I'm confident in my ability to tell whether or not a crayfish is a native of Britain.
ya what ever your fancy imagine catching these little suckers by the pounds and having big boils for country fun, be a good way too lessen the amount.. me i like old bay a little lemon and a little spicy...
Sadly river angling has been in decline for some years due to the rise in commercial fisheries which are overstocked giving some anglers easier sport. Thirty years ago the "angling army" would have been much more effective in the fight against the signal menace.
Come and get your starlings and we'll come get our crayfish and have a crawfish boil. Or throw some smallmouth bass in there, dads are like crack to them.
Smallmouth bass see crayfish as their natural ENEMY. Because crayfish invade and eat the eggs from fish beds, smallmouth bass Seek and Destroy every crawfish they can find. Way Beyond the numbers they're willing to eat
It doesn't take an entrepreneur to figure there's a potential market here for selling them to local markets or restraunts if they're so abundant and without limitations to your catch, you'd drop the population considerably where natives could be reintroduced.
@@SirFrogIII -- My wife says that my taste buds are dead... I actually found the supplier for the extract that is used to make pepper spray and use it to make my own hot sauce...
Oddly enough, there are a number of areas here in the US that are having problems with certain species of crawfish, which I believe are the same ones you have. Where I live in Ohio, our native species have made it to quite a few places outside our state and have been taking over and pushing out other native species. This particular type is highly invasive.
Signal Crayfish are native to the Pacific Northwest, I am from Washington and remember catching them, but in some waterways signal crayfish are being destroyed by the red swamp crawdad from the Louisiana (the one used most often in commercial crawfishing)
I was walking by a small river near Bath a couple of years ago, the path was littered with thousands of these things both dead and dying. I don't know why there were so many out of the water- do they emerge onto land for any reason?
+Rosie Cheeks You aren't free to go unless you illegally migrate, at which point you are essentially no better. Do you not understand how emigration works?
The nanny state is a big problem for this issue. Instead of giving open season to people to harvest them, and eat them, they make people jump through hoops to dispose of an invasive species.
I m a cajun living in philippines n we own 2 hectar rice field n will b trying to grow n cook them here very soon n hopefully will start something like we have in South Louisiana with the crawfish boils. I cannot wait n making me hungry now. God Bless
We’ve got native signal crawfish in my local river and they are DELICIOUS. A big signal can be eight inches or more from tail to claw tip and have 2-3 ounces of meat in it.
This is hilarious, if they have a predator, it could decrease the population. Sadly crayfish is not a diet that a lot of other cultures taken into yet.
mike sixx, I think river otters mostly eat fish so the lack of fish in these heavily infested creeks might be why they haven't moved in. Don't forget that the river otter was nearly extinct in the UK and although their numbers are back up to their strongest sized population since the industrial revolution, they're still not nearly as common as they would need to be to make a dent in the invasive crayfish problem.
Our (UK) waterways used to have many predatory bird and fish species, also otters and many other river adapted mammals. If we hadn't killed them all with hunting or habitat destruction, they would have collectively acted as an environmental buffer. Then I don't think the crayfish would have stood much of a chance reaching plague proportions.
Well said. The burbot, for example, are known to eat a lot(a lota!) crayfish in certain US lakes and rivers. As one hasn't been seen for more than 50 years, burbot are thought to be extinct in the UK (more specifically eastern England, where they were once native).
This is intolerable, how dare you call for persecution of the noble signal crayfish. Just because they wipe out natives and change the whole ecosystem, you should be jailed for your intolerance!
I'm listening to all the doom and gloom in the video and I was thinking.."turn these guys into a restaurant delicacy..". and then I read the comments section.. NONE of these people think its a problem.. just an airfare and some Cajun spices away!
