Why did Japan enact legislation to ban the sale of crayfish? Speaking of crayfish, this is the new Internet celebrity food in the mainland.
On the Internet, there is always a saying that "there is nothing that a meal of crayfish cannot solve, if there is, then eat again." "It shows how much the mainland people love crayfish."
Raw marinated crayfish can be made in summer and stir-fried crayfish can be eaten in winter. Foodies have developed lobster delicacies such as garlic crayfish, spicy crayfish, steamed crayfish, etc., and there are 800 ways to do a shrimp anyway, and in China, crayfish have become the new darlings on the dinner table.
Last year, the mainland produced 2.4 million tons of crayfish per year, generating more than 340 billion yuan in revenue, and the mainland people can be described as "hardcore fans" of crayfish.
But recently, Japan has enacted a law banning the sale of crayfish, and the status of crayfish, which is regarded as a treasure in the mainland, has plummeted. This makes many people wonder why it is forbidden to catch whales and discharge nuclear wastewater, so why is it that food that is so delicious has become a banned thing as soon as it arrives in Japan.
The "Exotic Journey" of Japanese Crayfish
This time, Japan signed the Invasive Alien Species Act, so along with the crayfish, there are also alien creatures such as mississippi red-eared turtles. It turns out that in Japan, the true identity of the crayfish is an exotic species with potential threats to the environment.
Crayfish are native to the United States, but the United States and Japan are separated by 18,000 miles, and the question of how crayfish crossed the vast ocean to Japan has to start in 1930.
At that time, there was a wave of consumption bullfrogs in Japan, bullfrogs were in short supply, and farmers began to raise bullfrogs.
In search of better feed for bullfrogs, farmers have gone to great lengths to target crayfish in the United States.
The meat of the crayfish is fat, soft and rich in protein, and when the crayfish is crushed, it is easy for bullfrogs to digest and provide rich nutrients for bullfrogs. Therefore, the crayfish came to Japan as "bullfrog feed" and began an "exotic journey".
However, the good times did not last long, and with the gradual weakening of the bullfrog trend, the demand for bullfrogs in Japan was no longer there. Many bullfrog farms have closed down, and crayfish used as feed have been able to "escape".
The crayfish fled into the wilderness, by streams, and jungles, surviving in the unfamiliar land of Japan with great adaptability and reproductive ability.
Crayfish are not picky eaters, whether it is algae or insect carcasses, as long as they can be eaten, crayfish are all appetites, and they are all received as ordered. Even when food is scarce, crayfish kill each other and feed on their own kind.
In just a few years, crayfish have occupied Japan's territory, and by the end of the 1990s, crayfish can be seen almost everywhere in Japan as a "foreign tourist".
The lethality of the "alien species" of the crayfish is also far beyond the imagination of the Japanese. For example, in the Japanese city of Kanazawa, there is a ferocious seafood variety, the sea crayfish, which has a shell as hard as armor and sharp pliers as a weapon, but even so, it is not a rival to the crayfish.
Due to the flooding of crayfish, the original food of the sea crawfish was taken away, resulting in many sea crayfish starving to death. Elsewhere in Japan, many native creatures face this dilemma.
Some people may ask, it is a tyrannical thing, why not eat it? Unfortunately, these wild crayfish contain a lot of heavy metal elements in their bodies, which is not good for the human body, so in this big war, the foodies are defeated.
The flood of crayfish has attracted great attention from the Japanese government, and Japan is surrounded by the sea, and it is very difficult to rectify the crayfish, so the Japanese government has also proposed a variety of coping plans before and after.
For example, the 2015 "List of Alien Species to Prevent Ecological Damage" put forward three principles: do not arbitrarily discard, do not release arbitrarily, and control the spread, so that crayfish can be controlled.
But the "crayfish nightmare" did not end there, which is why the Japanese government banned the sale of crayfish on the basis of the Invasive Alien Species Act.
The "Promotion Journey" of Chinese Crayfish
In the beginning, crayfish also came to China as an exotic species.
In 1998, a massive flood caused crayfish to begin flooding Chinese territory. Among them, the Yunnan region is the most serious persecution of crayfish, and the terraces of the World Cultural Heritage are destroyed by crayfish, which makes the Chinese people also hate crayfish, and the people and the government have begun to kill crayfish.
But like Japan, the crayfish have survived with amazing reproductive abilities.
In 2000, adhering to the title of "foodie country", the 1.3 billion foodies on the mainland also brought this small scourge to the table, and the status of crayfish was also promoted as never before.
Chinese people found that the meat of crayfish was fat and tender, and it was unexpectedly delicious, so they developed various cooking methods to make crayfish appear on the table in a different pattern. Chinese foodies are so strong that crayfish are now in short supply, and today, crayfish ranks 6th in freshwater aquaculture in the country, and crayfish has become an excellent food in the hearts of Chinese.
The problem of alien species cannot be ignored
Delicious is delicious, and the disaster of alien species cannot be ignored.
On the one hand, in environmental issues, the invasion of alien species can lead to a disorder in the local ecological balance, which can eventually lead to serious natural disasters.
Just like the Japanese crayfish, it eats all the food of the native Japanese creatures and makes the native creatures starve to death. Once alien organisms adapt to the local living environment, they are also prone to destroy biodiversity, and biological invasion has become the second biggest threat to biodiversity today.
It all starts with a bullfrog...
On the other hand, in economic matters, the invasion of alien species can also lead to economic imbalances. The invasion of alien species makes the living environment of the original organisms worse, which may lead to a sharp decrease in the number of the original organisms, greatly destroy the needs of the market trade circulation, and also lead to the destruction of the original economic market, causing a huge impact.
In any case, alien species invasions are now a globalization problem. With the facilitation of global trade and the integration of economic markets, alien species are a problem accompanied by globalization, and they are also issues that we should pay attention to. Only by protecting the earth's ecological environment can all mankind eat and live with peace of mind.