Fewer crayfish?

[chesters1]

This appears to be the distribution in scotland

http://www.invasivespeciesscotland.org.uk/north-american-signal-crayfish-pacifastacus-leniusulus/

I suppose theres many factors in where signal end up

Firstly where they escaped from

Where they were farmed

If a location is remote if its not near a river or stream so difficult to migrate to ,after all the white claws got there after the ice retracted so eventually their kin will

Ofcourse down south the waters are warmer so i presume theres less mortality

If the natives are not already hunted to near extinction is a factor

And ofcourse food ,the more popular the more bait goes in and the more crayfish it will support without imposing on the residents

They have no problems with cannibalism so are self sustainable to a point

 

Have great admiration for mink their perfectly "designed" for what they dobut like signals they really should not be doing it here ,you can blame the commercial enterprises for the problem and especially the government bodies that allowed them in to do it

Edited January 25, 2015 by chesters1

[Ken L]

The natives can go at a frightening speed. When I was 10 or 11, we would fish whiteclaw in Sutton Park in Birmingham and then, one summer, they all died. I continued splashing around in the streams well into my teens and fishing the pools there into my 30's but never saw another crayfish of any species.

[Dave H]

Crayfish are delicious with a bit of pepper and a slice of lemon. i remember a 5 day session 20 odd years back and we caught a few and put then in the pot..Yum Yum

[BoldBear]

One of my clubs has Turkish Crays and has had a licence to trap Crays for well over a decade. We used to have a person from a university who used to collect some of them from us for the university where they were trying to develop a method to eradicate them, however I don't think they were successful.

Nowerdays we just trap them and burn them.

 

They haven't been so abundant recently and I haven't seen one in the lake this year, they started to suffer from a fungus infection so hopefully that might have killed them off (famous last words LOL)

[Anderoo]

I still haven't seen one this winter...

[Paulg]

I've seen a lot less this season.....renewed my trapping licence, used trap twice for a grand total of a dozen crayfish....tasted nice though

[kenj]

They hibernate in the winter, burrowing deep into the banks, which is another reason to get rid of them. I caught several mini lobster sized ones in the Basingstoke Canal this year. On a quarter mile stretch of the Whitewater, six nets trapped over two thousand last year. A pike that had entered a net, was stripped bare in days.

[BoldBear]

I don't know whether the Signals do this but we've seen Turkish Crays on tree roots up out of the water along the edge of the lake at night.

[BobH]

They hibernate in the winter, burrowing deep into the banks, which is another reason to get rid of them. I caught several mini lobster sized ones in the Basingstoke Canal this year. On a quarter mile stretch of the Whitewater, six nets trapped over two thousand last year. A pike that had entered a net, was stripped bare in days.

 

Not the ones on the Lea, tonight we had constant problems with Crays and landed a couple, the rock hard boilies were lasting about half an hour, complete night mare and it was cold, down to freezing !1

 

Bob

[Phone]

Anderoo,

 

A lower census of crawdads is usually a good thing for the general welfare of the environment. Egg production is controlled by level of dissolved oxygen. The lower the "do" level the more eggs crawdads will produce.

 

Phone