I wrote an article about invasive species here in Connecticut a few years ago.  But we get new invasive species, so this is an article about the latest invasive animal.

Had lunch with a friend about a month ago, and she had the strangest story to tell. She lives in Lebanon and frequently hikes around the Lebanon town green. She reported seeing something red walking in the green. She approached it. To her it looked something like a red lobster, and as she got closer to it, it came after her! She ran away. I hadn’t seen this friend in some time because of the pandemic.  So I wondered if she was having vision problems. I asked her to pass me the salt, and she did not pass me the pepper, so at least she can still tell black from white. No one sitting around the lunch table had any idea of what she saw. Not long after that I saw an article about this new beast in two different state newspapers. The critter’s name?  Red swamp crayfish. This crayfish is invasive and highly aggressive. No wonder my friend ran away from it. It is native to Louisiana and has come to Connecticut because people would buy a huge shipment of live crayfish for a big meal and then release the ones they didn’t need to cook. My husband was a minister, and I remember one wedding he did where the bride was from Connecticut, and the groom was from Louisiana. The groom had a big shipment of these crayfish shipped up for the wedding reception. They were really yummy.  Of course, they were cooked so the issue of their aggression never came up.

The invasion of red crayfish reminds me of what people have done to the Everglades in Florida. People in Florida silly enough to buy baby pythons just don’t know what to do with them when they grow up into giant snakes. They have driven them to the Everglades in order for the snakes to live in the wild. What they didn’t expect is that a giant snake would eat a lot of the native birds and animals, plus they make lots more baby snakes that grow up into giant snakes. This has become a major problem for wildlife in the Everglades.

The moral of this article is to not let loose into your own local environment a species from a place very far away, because not only might it survive, but it might compete with the locals. I wonder if this is true for Yankees who marry redneck southerners and then bring their new spouse to New England!

Angela Hawkins Fichter