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Louisiana crawfish take over Italy- Aggressive species running roughshod

MASSACIUCCOLI, Italy -

 At first the Americans were welcome. They were admired. Robust and energetic, they looked like partners in a better, richer future. But they did not know their place. They did not respect limits. Conquest by conquest, they revealed themselves as too ambitious, too domineering, imposing their will on less truculent populations. Now many Italians in this northern Tuscan town have had enough. They would like to say arrivederci to the big red rapacious Louisiana crawfish. Lake Massaciuccoli can be seen as the murky, reedy theater for a clash of zoological cultures: the brawny Americans vs. the aggrieved Europeans. Italian biologists and wildlife experts say that Louisiana crawfish, brought here more than a decade ago as a culinary experiment, multiplied like mad, ascended the food chain, altered the ecosystem and devoured indigenous flora and fauna, including their European-crawfish cousins. "I've never seen anything like it," said Sergio Paglialunga, the director of Massaciuccoli Park, which encompasses the lake in which the Louisiana crawfish established its beachhead. "They eat the vegetation," Paglialunga said on Friday as he rode in a motorboat that plied the lake's dark, cloudy surface, an opaque cover for the danger that lay beneath. "They eat everything." So park managers and biologists are redoubling their efforts to get rid of them. They said that one of the few species of lake fish that can turn the clawed predators into crawling prey is the pike, thousands of which are being deployed into battle. "We have changed the rules," said Paolo Ercolini, a biologist who is closely monitoring the situation. Somebody else changed the rules in the first place, and that was the problem. Ercolini and others familiar with the history said that it happened around 1990, when a local entrepreneur decided to farm Louisiana crawfish in this broad, marshy lake, once one of Puccini's favorite haunts. Similar experiments with Louisiana crawfish had been conducted in Spain and other European countries, which were drawn to the species because it was hardier and meatier than its Continental counterparts. Sure enough, a modest market for the crawfish developed. But as the years went by, there were unintended effects. Certain types of fish and frogs in the lake suddenly became scarce - or worse. The Louisiana crawfish were not only more gluttonous and brutish than their delicate European cousins. They also had an expansionist streak. Biologists and park managers said that the Louisiana crawfish would walk from one source of water to another, colonizing areas far beyond Massaciuccoli. "Now you find them in all of Tuscany," Paglialunga said.