Crayfish plague

Crayfish plague, Aphanomyces astaci, is a water mould that infects and kills the European Astacus crayfish. It arrived to Italy with ballast waters from a North American ship and quickly spread through Europe.

After its original introduction in Italy in 1860, it spread quickly through Europe and was discovered in Sweden in 1907, in Spain in 1958, in Norway in 1971, in the United Kingdom in 1981, in Turkey in 1984 and in Ireland in 1987.

It has wiped out large populations of Astacus. Unfortunately, the Swedes tried to find a replacement crayfish in the 1950s and the 1960s and settled on the signal crayfish. The signal crayfish is, although resistant, a carrier of the plague, and efforts to reintroduce the original European crayfish, has been quite unsuccessful because of subsequent large implantations of signal crayfish, most of them done on private initiative. Such implantations of the signal crayfish was the reason for the spread of the desease to United Kingdom and Ireland.

In Norway, though, some recent implantations of Astacus have been promising.

External Links

• http://www.issg.org/database/species/ecology.asp?si=107&fr=1&sts=sss