Just the other day we talked about a walrus who hitched a ride on an ice chunk from the Arctic Circle all the way to the coast of Ireland. I assume someone gave him a lift home.
But now comes the story of another marine animal - a thousand times smaller and tastier - who took a sea voyage. It's Maryland's own “Chesapeake blue crab,” a native of the Western Atlantic and Gulf of Mexico which somehow turned up on Dollymount Strand recently. Dollymount Strand is a beach, and blue crabs go to beaches all the time. But this beach is in Dublin, Ireland!
And Ireland's National Biodiversity Data Centre says the CB crab is bigger and more competitive that local Irish crabs, and that the female can lay up to six million eggs a year.
So, if enough Blue crabs wind up in Ireland, the Irish crabs would lose, and we would have to start shipping mallets, National Beer, and Old Bay seasoning to the Emerald Isle. They have their own newspapers for use as tablecloths.
As attempts to interrogate the crab proved fruitless (who likes fruit with crabs, anyway?) the Irish are still stumped as to how the crab wound up over there. Actually, there have been two sightings at Dollymount, but the hope is that it was the same crab, seen twice.
And they are hoping that blue crabs will not feel so welcome in their area. By comparison, the Chesapeake Bay, and of course the Gulf, are much warmer than the Irish Atlantic Coast, so maybe this will one will text his family members back home here and tell them not to swim over.
Irish officials say that maybe someone released the crab over there, hoping they were doing the right thing, but if they were to proliferate, it could disrupt an entire food chain, so "never release a non-native into the wild."
And we need them over here this summer, so don't send them to Ireland, please.
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