The blue crab is moving up towards Lake Garda: 'Impossible to stop it'

30 August 2023

A possibility that for the WWF of Brescia and Bergamo is highly probable. Despite the fact that it is an animal that prefers salt water, the blue crab has managed to move even beyond the saline wedge that creeps into the Po.
The environmental association reported that some specimens were caught in the Mantua area: the animal is therefore less than 100 kilometres from Lake Garda. For the Lombardy section of the WWF, it is not certain that it can adapt and thus proliferate in the Benaco, where the waters are very different from those of the Adriatic; but that it can reach it is for environmentalists almost a certainty.

And little can be done to curb this advance. Just as little has been done to curb the arrival of other animals belonging to non-native species in our beloved lake. Filippo Gavazzoni, vice-president of the Garda Community, has counted about forty of them, and the last one was only counted a year ago. The blue crab could be the 44th, and others could follow.

The suggestion that Gavazzoni repeated on Facebook again today, Monday 28 August, is that the regions approve the law on sanitising the hulls and engines of Garda boats: 'I do not know the biology of the blue crab, although I am studying it out of curiosity,' Gavazzoni wrote. 'My position remains clear and unequivocal, however: we must arrive as soon as possible at the interregional law on sanitising hulls and engines, already proposed and formulated in the Lake Contract signed in Peschiera del Garda in 2019. The Veneto has already implemented it, and as soon as Lombardy and the Province of Trento do the same we will put a brake on further new introductions of potentially invasive species, with a measure that is unique in Italy. It is a question of protecting native biodiversity, which is everyone's heritage, and of common sense, dictated by scientific evidence'.

Source: Veronasera.it

Read the full article: https://www.bresciatoday.it/cronaca/lago-di-garda-granchio-blu.html