A new hatchery in North Yorkshire aims to protect endangered crayfish.
Work has started on the facility at Flamingo Land near Malton with hopes of housing captive-born crayfish by spring 2024 and bringing in wild females with eggs by summer 2025.
Animals raised in the hatchery will be used to bolster wild populations around North Yorkshire.
The white-clawed crayfish, Austropotamobius pallipes, is Britain’s only native species of freshwater crayfish and is facing huge declines across North Yorkshire and beyond.
Flamingo Land is working in collaboration with the North Yorkshire Crayfish Forum which was created to help conserve the endangered white-clawed crayfish in the county.
Threats of invasive species carrying crayfish plague pose a threat to the crayfish population in North Yorkshire and mean only 5 per cent of young crayfish survive to adulthood.
The Flamingo Land hatchery hopes to increase the survival rate by up to 90 per cent.
Vanessa Barlow, crayfish stakeholder officer at Yorkshire Wildlife Trust which hosts the North Yorkshire Crayfish Forum, described the project as “very exciting”.
“White-clawed crayfish have drastically declined in the last 30 years and are at the risk of extinction in the UK – but this is a fantastic project to improve their prospects and the prospects for other wildlife in North Yorkshire’s rivers,” she said.
“By utilising different forum member's skills and expertise, this project illustrates precisely why the forum was first set up in 2019. Hatcheries are a key tool for crayfish conservation and will massively improve this species' chance of survival in North Yorkshire.”
Flamingo Land’s conservation officer Kieran Holliday said: “This is an extremely ambitious project for us here, and we are proud to be involved in a programme that could help with the conservation of a unique and keystone endangered species.”
“We have had guidance from Jen Nightingale, the UK conservation manager for Bristol Zoological Society, who is an expert in white-clawed crayfish, and this hatchery is an amalgamation of her vision and vast knowledge, and I am truly thankful for her help.
“I am keen for Flamingo Land to be a key player in native species conservation in North Yorkshire and beyond, and my ambition is that we continue to get involved in these breeding, release and rewilding projects to a point where Flamingo Land is a key stakeholder in North Yorkshire conservation.
“Working with local conservation organisations such as Yorkshire Wildlife Trust is a sure-fire way of us building towards this aim.”
Flamingo Land hopes the hatchery will provide an educational impact to visitors who can learn how to protect crayfish themselves.
The project has received funding from the Environmental Agency and Yorkshire Water.
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