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Crayfish Plague




  Name Crayfish plague
  Regnum Protista
  Phylum Heterokontophyta
  Classis Oomycetes
  Ordo Saprolegniales
  Familia Leptolegniaceae
  Genus '' Aphanomyces ''
  Species '''''A astaci'''''
  Binomial ''Aphanomyces astaci''
  Binomial Authority Schikora , 1906


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 disease to United Kingdom and Ireland.

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


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