Egypt’s location within both Africa and Asia, as well as it’s closness to Europe led to the passage of different foreign species through it besides the past colonization of the European countries for a lot of the African countries, among them is Egypt. Water hyacinth (Echornia crassipes) and crayfish (Procambarus clarkia), recently, are considered as serious nuisance invaders in the habitat of River Nile, also Prosopis (Prosopis juliflora) is an invader in the south-east corner of Egypt.
An invasive species is a species occurring, as a result of human activities, beyond its accepted normal distribution and which threatens valued environmental, agricultural or other social resources by the damage it causes.
Invasive species have been cited as one of the greatest threats to biodiversity for not having natural predators or parasites, for their rapid reproduction and their rapid adaptation to new environments and their early maturity, for their aggressive growth and spread and because the native species are frequently out-competed.
Crayfish has found its way to the Nile via an unfortunate mishap. Someone who has a shrimp farm in Al-Qanater imported the crayfish from the USA, thinking they are a kind of prawn. However, they ate their way through the mud paritions, destroying all the other tanks. What does the shrimp farm owner do? He gets rid of the pests by releasing them into the Nile! The entire delta is infested with crayfish after the above mishap but not yet made its way south of the delta, stopping at Bani Sweif.
There are two strategies proposed to get rid of that crayfish, either by eliminating of crayfish from River Nile and irrigation canals or using of crayfish as a resource of animal protein. |
