Eating the enemy

Alien species are being put on the menu in what campaigners say is the perfect green solution to save the UK's native animals

Nigel Burnham
The Guardian, Wednesday 18 March 2009

What can be done about invasive alien species? Governments and conservationists try to eradicate them, sometimes at enormous expense, but one group of people has another idea: just eat them.

Ben Carter, a north Yorkshire zoologist working in fisheries management, is making a very good living trapping the environmentally-damaging American crayfish, selling up to 20,000 a week as a gourmet delicacy to some of the country's top chefs.

Carter offers a service to landowners, farmers and angling clubs to remove non-native crayfish from rivers, as well as working for conservation bodies such as the National Trust to reduce river bank erosion caused by the US invader.

The American crayfish (Pacifastacus leniusculus) is currently a big problem in the south of England, but has reached as far north as Yorkshire and is threatening the protected native white-clawed crayfish (Austropotamobius pallipes).

"They're a big problem because they cause a lot of environmental damage by burrowing in riverbanks and eating our native crayfish," says Carter, who got the idea of catching and selling the aliens when he was fishing for big carp for angling clubs in water authority reservoirs and netting shoals of bream in country estate lakes.

"I was catching coarse fish for angling clubs and began to realise what a serious problem the crayfish was becoming to anglers," he says. "You couldn't get a bait in the water without it being taken by crays. I now have bookings for stacks of removal work. Then I found that I could also sell the crays as a top-quality food."

Full story at: http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/mar/18/food-environment