CALGARY – In the shallow waters of Nose Creek, burrowed beneath the rocks, are thousands of animals you might assume belong in the sea.
Brad Wutzke and his son Jevin have been pulling Crayfish – a so-called “freshwater lobster” out of the creek near Airdrie by the bucketful.
“I found part of a carcass by Nose Creek by Memorial Drive,” Wutzke said. “It kind of intrigued me, so I started looking further and found they’re all over Nose Creek. We’re pulling hundreds and hundreds out and it’s no trouble to come back to the same spot and pull another 50 to 100 out.”
Crayfish, also known as crawfish or “mudbugs” are native to waterways in Northern Alberta, but not to the Calgary area. The Alberta government first discovered them in Nose Creek in 2011. It suggests people transferred them from other parts of the province – a highly illegal move and one that could have dire ecological consequences.
“Northern Crayfish have not been extensively studied in terms of their ecological impacts,” Tanya Rushcall, an aquatic invasive species technician with Alberta Environment and Parks, said. “But they do eat a large variety of plants, invertebrates and small fish. So they could cause problems, potentially, with competition and predation with native species.”
That’s of even greater concern now that Crayfish have also moved into the Bow River, a waterway world-renowned for its trophy fishing.
“We’ve been catching them in the irrigation canal for quite a few years,” Lesley Peterson, provincial biologist for Trout Unlimited, said. “The canal comes off the Bow River just downstream the mouth of Nose Creek, so I suspect they’ve been coming down Nose Creek and down the Bow River and some of them getting into the irrigation canals.”
Fish and Game laws require that any Crayfish caught in Nose Creek or the Bow River must be killed before leaving the shoreline. But there’s not currently any provincial initiative underway to eradicate the species, which appears to be thriving.
The Wutzke family has their own solution. In less than an hour, Jevin caught almost 100 Crayfish in an area just off Country Hills Boulevard Tuesday.
“We cook ’em up, boil ’em. They taste like lobster – a little garlic butter – they’re wonderful.”