Roy L Hales/ Cortes Currents - The Friends of Cortes Island (FOCI) have not found any European Green Crabs in Manson's lagoon and so far there've been no sightings north of Nanaimo.
“We haven't found any, that’s really good news, but we've been very pleased to partner with DFO. Hopefully, if we ever find them, we'll be able to track them out and stop them from harming the valuable habitat here.”
34 explained Helen Hall, executive director of FOCI.
“We got contacted by the Department of Fisheries and Ocean last year. They wanted to come onto the island as part of a project they're doing with a lot of communities up and down the coast, to try and find out whether green crabs are spreading in this area. We set traps in Manson's Lagoon twice last year, and very luckily we didn't find any.”
“This year DFO came back and said this is a project they want to keep doing. They bring all the traps over, we trapped last month and we didn't find any.”
“It's a brilliant learning exercise for our summer student, 58 Manuel Perdisa and we have two volunteers, Penny and Claude, who have helped us on other projects.”
“This week the three of them went out with Patty Menning from DFO. They're setting two types of traps, a large prawn trap and smaller minnow traps. 12 traps were set in Manson's Lagoon on one day and the next day we go back . They get the traps out of the water, empty them into a plastic container which has water in them. We found lots and lots of graceful crabs. We're actually measuring those crabs as a recording exercise, but we also found some other interesting species, then we release everything back into the lagoon. We keep all those records and the data's going back to DFO..
“We haven't found any, that’s really good news, but we've been very pleased to partner with DFO. Hopefully, if we ever find them, we'll be able to track them out and stop them from harming the valuable habitat here.
According to Renny Talbot, Aquatic Invasive Species Coordinator for Fisheries and Oceans Canada (DFO), there have not been any sightings north of Nanaimo in the Salish Sea area.
CC: Where are you looking for European Green Crabs in my broadcast area?
Renny Talbot: “We’re looking on Cortes Island and Quadra Island, as well as the Fanny Bay area and Comox. We've set up with local stewardship groups and with our First Nations partners, early detection monitoring programs in those locations.”
CC: Who is your partner on Quadra?
Renny Talbot: “We have a representative, Patty Menning, who's working with the We Wai Kai First Nation.”
CC: What about Campbell River?
Renny Talbot: “We don't have a site in Campbell River right now. We have done opportunistic trapping in that location, but we didn't have a really good site to set up long term monitoring.”
“Our early detection monitoring program: it's once a month and it runs from from April to to October. They do a 24 hour soak. We're looking for European Green Crab, but it's also creating a baseline of those intertidal crab, fish and things like that we're catching. So that if if there is an invasion, we can really understand the ecological impact that's occurring.”
“We are lucky that there's some quasi barriers, with the Juan de Fuca as well as with the Johnson Strait, which have limited the the entry of European green Creb larva into the Salish Sea.”
“The larvae need greater than 10 degrees Celsius to survive.”
