Ancient Chinese rice terraces menaced by crayfish
South west China's spectacular terraced rice paddies are under threat from an invasion of crayfish.
Farmers plant rice seedlings in Yunnan Province, China Photo: CORBIS
By Malcolm Moore, Beijing
5:22PM GMT 22 Mar 2013
The trouble in Yuanyang started seven years ago, when a villager decided to raise some crayfish, a freshwater crustacean that looks like a small lobster and is known in China as a xiaolongxia, or Little Dragon Shrimp, in his rice paddy.
The crayfish have destroyed some 5,000 acres of rice paddies
Soon the crayfish multiplied, spread, and started burrowing deep into the landscape, showing no respect for its Unesco World Heritage status.
Now the local government is spending £120,000 a year to fight the plague of shellfish - killing 3.7 million of the critters last year - and has strictly banned the sale of crayfish in the county.
According to the Chinese media, the crayfish have destroyed some 5,000 acres of rice paddies, which are now unable to hold water because of all the holes.
Li Xue, the local party chief, said: "If we do not do something, the whole mountain of terraces will cease to exist."
Mr Li said that the farmers had no idea that crayfish like to make their home deep in the m&d, and indeed are often called mudbugs in the United States. "We would never have allowed anyone to raise them here if we had known."
Unesco described the Hani terraces in Yuanyang as a "unique and integrated ecological system... a vast artificial everglade (where) aquatic animals and plants co-existed to meet the basic needs of hundreds of thousands of Hani people".
Additional reporting by Valentina Luo
