American Crayfish Are Running Amok in Europe
· The Atlantic
Confronted with a seasoned, boiled, arguably delicious crayfish, some of the people of the Netherlands are not sure exactly what to do. “Do you suck the head out?” I heard from the table next to me earlier this summer, at Two Chefs, a restaurant in Amsterdam that hosts a monthly crayfish boil.
Yes is the answer: The best way to eat a crayfish is to shell the tail, then slurp the flavored juices out of the head, and pick out the remaining meat with your hands.
Visit rouesnews.click for more information.
This strategy might not be an immediate transatlantic hit. At the boil, one 29-year-old from Maastricht likened the meal to shrimp but with more work. Two twins told me that the crayfish would need to look a little more chic on the plate to appeal to the Dutch public. But, given the ever-growing population of crayfish in the Netherlands, coming around to eating more of them could benefit the country.
Because if Dutch consumers aren’t sure how they feel about crayfish, crayfish inarguably love the Netherlands. They have invaded the country’s waterways so thoroughly that they have become a real problem, and dealing with them will mean persuading more creatures—including Dutch people—to eat more crayfish.
The crayfish invasion started decades ago, but in recent years, the red swamp crayfish (also known as the Louisiana crawfish) has become a particular pest, Pim Lemmers, an ecologist at Radboud University who has dedicated his career to researching crayfish, told me. In the 1980s, it was brought to the Netherlands as food, and people naively released the animals into the environment. The waterways in the Netherlands are very interconnected and became a “crayfish highway” of sorts, Ivo Roessink, an aquatic ecotoxicologist at Wageningen University & Research, told me. But crayfish can walk and breathe on land, too, and have been spotted in parks, along bike lanes, and at Schiphol airport, where the birds use the runway to crush them.
And they can dig—burrows up to three feet long that can collapse the edges of fields into the water and that some people fear could damage the country’s extensive system of dams, dikes, and canals. Scientists emphasize that the risk to dams and dikes is low; from their point of view, the bigger risk is to other creatures that live in the water. Crayfish are omnivorous: “They totally destroy underwater vegetation,” Roessink said. They also eat detritus, amphibian and insect larvae, snails and other invertebrates, small fish, and one another—a sight I witnessed for myself.
But crayfish cannibalism will not end the invasion; in fact, although the Netherlands’ central government is working on a program for crayfish management, getting rid of the species will likely be impossible. “I know of one example where they effectively eradicated crayfish, and that was in the U.S.,” Roessink said. “There was an infected pond, and they turned it into a parking lot.” (Resorting to this solution in the Netherlands would require paving over the entire country.) Research in the Netherlands and elsewhere has shown that even extensive trapping won’t necessarily eliminate crayfish. The most anyone can hope for is fewer of them.
Some water boards of the Netherlands are trying to persuade all sorts of creatures to eat more crayfish, including herons, eels, and European catfish, which are themselves something of an invasive threat. And, in theory, one of the crayfish’s most effective predators could be Dutch people.
Stefan van Ekris and Maarten van der Sanden, who are both managing directors at CrawFish Farm Holland, are trying their best to make it happen. This July, I joined them as they put on waders and immersed themselves in irrigation ditches to set and check their crayfish nets in the Groene Hart, or “Green Heart,” of the Netherlands, the thinly populated pastures and peatlands among some of the country’s largest cities. They get paid per kilogram caught—the expedition I joined yielded about 150 kilograms, or 330 pounds, of live crayfish—but this is really a passion project for them. CrawFish Farm Holland is approved to sell live and prepared catch directly to restaurants and other wholesalers, and hopes to sell its crayfish in supermarkets in the next two years. “We’re not cultivating them,” Van der Sanden told me. “We’re fighting them and eating them.”
In America, Van der Sanden pointed out, Louisiana was able to quickly ramp up crayfish production and demand in the 1980s. But the scientists I spoke with were skeptical of this strategy. “You will never eat yourself out of this crisis,” Roessink said. And if people like crayfish too much, Lemmers said, they might start cultivating crayfish in their backyard or trapping them without oversight, which could promote further spread. Even if more Dutch people come around to the pleasures of a messy boil, the crayfish still could come out ahead.