Italian "Chinese Street" news: as soon as they hear about eating crabs, street friends must be drooling, but the delicious crab flood has caused fishermen in Caorle, Venice, Italy, a lot of headaches. This is an invasion of alien species, and global warming is creating the conditions for these invaders.
A species called Callinectes Sapidus ( belonging to the family Pike ) , originally native to the Atlantic coast and later invaded the Mediterranean , poses a threat to native species because it is an omnivore and reproduces quickly. It feeds on shrimp, silverfish, cuttlefish, perch, clams and mussels, while also causing significant damage to fishermen's nets and seaweed beds for local fry.
Fishermen in the Caorle Lagoon in Venice, as well as fishermen in other lagoon waters in Venice, have been fishing for generations, but due to large-scale reclamation, many lagoons have been unaffected by the ebb and flow of the tides, losing their unique fishing conditions, and the invasion of blue king crab has exacerbated this already difficult fishing environment. Let the lagoon's 500 fishermen's families are going through some of the toughest times of the last century.
According to the Venice Natural Museum, these crab fry, probably arriving in the late 1980s with the ballast water of black cargo ships, led to a significant decrease in fish in places where they passed, followed by the Baltic Sea in 2000, the Croatian coast in 2005, and the species in large numbers near the Venetian coast in August 2016, both offshore and on the beach, and finally they came to the lagoon with the tide.
Now, there are not many ways to solve the blue king crab, the only best way is to eat, Caorle Mayor Marco Sarto intervened in the Caorle fishing industry this month, agreeing to sell the blue king crab to the market in large quantities to share the fishermen's worries.
At present, this blue king crab is more and more in the market, the price is not expensive, most of them are around 12 euros / kg, interestingly, the cooking recipes of blue crab also exist on various Italian food websites, telling people that these breeds that annoy fishermen are actually edible and delicious. So, if the street friends are hungry, they may wish to share the worries of the Venice lagoon together!