On the pond of Canet, nobody has a crush on the blue crab...

The blue crab is a plague that does not come from Egypt but from North America.

Its beautiful blue livery changes nothing, nor the delicacy of its flesh claimed by fine palates who love shellfish.

Landed on the Spanish coasts, it began its rise there in 2018 in the Ebro delta, where the long list of its misdeeds began.

Read alsoFishermen in Corsica worried about the proliferation of blue crab

It is a voracious that leaves almost nothing alive in its path. The problem is that it did not arrive alone on the Spanish coasts, where we tried to establish it to create a market. As a result, it is now found everywhere on the French Mediterranean coast and it poses very serious problems in the pond of Canet, in the Pyrénées-Orientales.

Last summer, in 2021, 25,000 blue crabs, mainly young of the year, were caught, specifies the Occitanie region which took charge of the file.

And look for solutions.

Fishermen are angry the blue crab has reduced their traditional catches of eels and green crabs.

And naturalists are just as concerned about seeing the eelgrass beds, essential to water quality, degraded because of the burrows that these crabs dig... There is danger in the pond.

A game already lost?

The region will therefore devote 400,000 euros over the next two years to try to stem the phenomenon in the pond, knowing that the crab crossed the grau this summer and that it can now also thrive at sea.

From this year, the fishermen, equipped with special nets, will carry out scientific fishing to help researchers better understand the animal, its life cycle, its strengths and its weaknesses and allow the development of a management plan for limit the degradation of the natural environment.

It will also be necessary to beware of illusions, the eradication of the blue crab is already very unlikely, the plan therefore also provides for a reflection on the development of a market to create income for the fishermen who are today harmed.

The largest crabs could be marketed whole frozen and the small individuals sent to processors to be incorporated into soups... Hoping that the prices paid will then compensate for those of the eels which are traded today between 6 and 7 euros per kilo.