Canal Roach — A Signal Defeat?

Well the roach session did throw up a surprise, but a nasty one. Bream were biting and I had a couple of them as always but no sign of roach in the first chosen peg. Bites came around the half hour mark, which is usual for bread fished over mash, but then they tailed off and didn't look as if they'd return.

Second peg bites came after five minutes, but once again bream were the culprit. However, a few tentative sharp dips around the half hour mark put me on guard for the desired big lift of the float from feeding roach. But, it never came...

When recast the float refused to settle down to the tip as it should but stayed aloft, the final shot placed just an inch from the bait had not hit bottom. I thought it had landed on a twig which would produce the same effect but strangely the float seemed to be moving slowly and steadily to the left.

Not something I've ever seen before, I left it to continue and when it crossed into the deepest part of the boat track the float very gradually vanished. A moving twig? Surely not.

There was nothing there. No twig, no branch, no nothing, moving or not.

It happened again, and again. And then finally I hooked the twig, and it felt like one too, even looked like one for a brief moment...

Gimme a big hug...

Ah no. Not you!

I thought I'd never see signal crayfish penetrate so deep into the city territory of the Coventry Canal with its almost unbroken steel revetments and hard packed towpath banks. Unfortunately there's gaps along the far bank, here and there, where the banks meet the waters without a barrier between and that's all the buggers need to breed and survive.

Jesus, they exploit watercourses with gay abandon, don't they. No doubt they'll be crawling up the drainpipes next, taking up residence in the lavatory pan, eating our turds and thriving too.

Is nowhere sacred...?

There's just no answer to them, you know. Simply no way to control let alone eradicate them. Everything tried has failed — successes have been brief and rebounded badly. Research continues but it's wasted time, effort and money. Nothing works.

The only thing that has not been tried, as yet, though many think it the only viable way forward, is Sterile Insect Technique. Hoards of sterile males are released into an environment overrun with a plague of an invasive or damaging species, they outcompete fertile males due to their greater numbers, breed with fertile females who then lay infertile eggs.

The life cycle of an insect can be broken, indeed screwworm was completely eradicate from the 176 square-mile Venezuelan island of Curacao in just seven weeks. However, the female of that species mates just once in her life...

Crayfish just go on and on.

I'm sure it would be tried with them on a trial basis at least, if only a way could be found to chop the boy's nads off. No one has succeeded in doing that yet. I wouldn't know where they were in fact I can't tell the difference between the boys and the girls.

I've heard they can hybridise with native crayfish, though, or at least they can mate with them. I cannot find hard non-contradictory fact about whether or not they actually can produce offspring or just infertile eggs. Some authorities say the one thing, some the other.

But if hybrid offspring were created they would be infertile, wouldn't they?

So, find out if that is true, breed trillions of these saviours, eat the females, release the males en-masse into every place, and kill the signal bastards off!

(Take out the native crays first though! If you can find any...)

The cost though. That's what stops progress. It's not that it wouldn't cost a lot to do — it would. It's that the plague doesnt cost the economy enough to warrant it.

Only when so chock full of them the culverted Tyburn pops its manholes and overflows into the streets of Westminster, The Embankment is so deeply undermined by breeding burrows that Big Ben lists militantly to the left, and our Prime Minister gets his nads bitten, on the khazi, 10 Downing Street, will anyone do anything about them.

Till then, they're here to stay.