Jan 30th, 2017:Chinese Mitten Crab

[xoxoxoBruce]

I wouldn’t mess with this guy, got his gloves on, probably a pro fighter.
He’s called a Chinese mitten crab, so he probably does that sneaky ninja stuff too.



They’re a delicacy caught from Hong Kong to Korea, everywhere else they’re a nasty invasive species.
It’s not hard to figure out how they made it from Hong Kong to London.
They’ve been in the Thames for a long time but now they are spreading.

They’re aggressive, have few predators and will eat almost anything, aquatic plants, native fish eggs,
mollusks, probably even my first wife’s cooking. Their opportunistic lifestyle has makes them successful,
but at a high cost to the local environment. To make things worse, they can burrow a meter(40in) or more
into river banks, so when floods come to areas where there’s been a lot of crabs, river banks collapse.



They're happy in both fresh and saltwater. In fact, they’re born in coastal regions or estuaries, then migrate
up the river, hang out for years, then get horny and boogie down to the coast to breed. However, once they
are in freshwater, studies have shown they can migrate up to 1,500 km(932mi).
This crab can even leave the water, cross dry land and enter a new river system.

They ever have the dubious honor of making the IUCN (the International Union for Conservation of Nature)
100 of the world’s worst alien species list. So if you see one, eat it.

[Snakeadelic]

Quoting Bruce: "So if you see one, eat it."

YES. Preferably as an appetizer before an entree of Atlantic-caught lionfish. Single most ecologically friendly seafood dinner on the planet, as lionfish are native to Indonesia and SE Asia but are currently devastating the Atlantic coastline from parts of Florida and the Gulf all the way down to central Brazil. My local grocery store's butcher block manager is looking for a distributor that carries Atlantic lionfish--ask yours as well! The more the demand, the better chance that not every Caribbean reef will be virtually lifeless in the next decade or so, plus rumor has it that lionfish is gourmet-quality tasty. They're venomous, but the venom's all at the bases of fin spines and is removed before cooking.