Crayfish Capers - Part 1

SAM MOSSMAN

Like many people, I love the occasional feed of crayfish.

I don’t want to eat it every day, you understand, but some of my fondest memories include sitting around a makeshift table (those huge wooden drums used to store heavy cable were the favourite of the time) at Clifton Beach in Hawkes Bay, digging into a feed of freshly-cooked crayfish, snapping open the legs and sucking out the sweet flesh from inside. As I became a little older, the accompaniment of a cold beer made the experience all the sweeter. Just a simple thing, but one of life’s great pleasures and an integral part of the Kiwi lifestyle for many.

At the time, catching and eating crays was a routine part of the summer holidays for us kids – just like fishing and snorkelling for paua, collecting shells and bird feathers along the tide line, making small rafts from inter-woven ice-cream sticks, skipping stones in the shallows and making sandcastles (hollow volcanoes with a small fire lit inside to create smoke from the summit hole were common structures).

While we weren’t great divers, the crayfish were not hard to catch with a homemade pot or two set at rocky reefs along the coast; this provided all the crays you wanted to eat in those far-off summers.
However, although we didn’t know it then, there was a cloud on the horizon. Around the time I was born – in the late 1950s – the first shipments of New Zealand crays (or ‘rock lobsters’ as the commercial companies [and the B52s] would have it) were made to the USA, and the rest, as they say, is history, leading to today’s $180M (2008 figures) industry.

Eventually overfishing forced crayfish onto the Quota Management System (and as a reward for beating the fishery half to death, 90% of a public resource was given into commercial hands for their own profit in 1990), and cheap and plentiful crays – which we once took for granted – are now a thing of the past. If you want to buy one nowadays, you must pay export prices – around $70 per kilo. This is big money, having the dual effect of putting crays beyond the pockets of many, and encouraging poaching and a lucrative black market (estimated at 450 tonnes a year, this is around the same as the estimated legal recreational take, while the commercial quota is around ten times this amount).

There is another consequence, one that affects those whose only chance of getting a taste of crayfish is to catch their own, often during the summer break. High export prices encourage quota levels that allow the commercial industry to fish cray stocks down to the bone, as well as the adoption of such cons as ‘concession crayfish’, allowing commercial operators in some areas to take smaller crays over the winter than the public is allowed, effectively taking next year’s catch. That means by the time the summer holidays roll around, there is hardly a legal cray left for recreational (and customary) fishers. If I sound bitter about this, I probably am, having lived through the good old days.

When overfishing was at its worst in my old home patch of the Hawkes Bay coast (CRA4) a couple of summers ago, I pulled a recreational cray pot off Cape Kidnappers that had 45 crayfish in it. We thought we had struck the jackpot – until we started measuring them: nearly every one was a millimetre or two under the mark, and there was not a single keeper in the pot! This was fairly typical of the fishery of that time.
It got so bad that pretty much everyone who was running a pot or two in the hope of catching a cray for Christmas or New Year’s dinner brought their pots back to shore and gave up.

It must have been tough for the commercial blokes too, as they had voluntarily cut their catches back in both 2007 and 2008. (Recreational fishers matched this with a voluntary reduction on daily bag limits in 2008.) But this was not enough to have much effect, and in late 2009 there was finally some belated action, with the commercial quota (TACC) for the region slashed by 40%. As a result, in the summer of 2009-2010 there were enough ‘legal’ crays around to provide the public with at least a taste of a kaimoana that export prices have pushed way beyond the means of the average person.

I went back to work after the break this year happy to have enjoyed a few crayfish dinners with friends and family. But don’t hold your breath – I am informed that the National Rock Lobster Management Group (NRLMG) has provided the Minister of Fisheries with initial advice on proposed changes for rock lobster fisheries for the fishing year beginning April 1, 2010. They propose a near 200-tonne increase in CRA4, even though the CRA4 Catch per Unit of Effort (CPUE) is still very poor. Unless the minister shows some spine and sticks up for a more conservative approach to managing the fishery, we will be back to the bad times before you can say “rape and pillage”.

Cray life and times
There are two main types of marine crayfish in our waters: red (or spiny) and packhorse (green); the commercial industry and the scientists usually refer to them as rock lobsters, but I will always think of them as crays.

Packhorse – the world’s largest species rock lobster – are the less common of the two and most frequently found in the North Island, north of Mahia Peninsula. They have a growth potential twice that of reds, and have been recorded up to 15kg (30lb) in weight – one hell of a bug, and a pretty daunting critter to tackle! Packhorses are not all that common; known hotspots are White Island, Great Barrier and Cape Reinga. The last area is the only known major spawning ground for the species.

Much more is known about their common smaller cousins, the reds. These are the crays usually encountered by potters and divers. They can live for 30 years and start breeding at around seven to ten years of age. Exceptional specimens have weighed 8kg, but they are usually more like a kilo or so.

Crays are protected by a hard shell, which they must moult as they grow. Small crays moult up to three or four times a year, but as they become adults this happens only once a year. Crays tend to move into protected shallow water for this, as they are vulnerable during the soft-shell phase while their new shells are hardening. Any legs or feelers lost since the last moult are regenerated with the new shell. Adult males moult between October and December, females between February and May, and mating takes place soon after this.
Females may be distinguished from males by the much larger paired pleopods under the tail and by having a small pincer on each of the back legs (which the male lacks) for manipulating the eggs.
Females carry up to half a million eggs around under their tails for several months. They are said to be ‘in berry’ at this stage and it is illegal to take them at this time, or while either sex is in soft shell.

When the eggs hatch, the spider-like larvae drift freely as part of the open-water plankton for a year or more, passing through 11 larval stages and growing from two to 50mm in this time. Survivors settle inshore as transparent ‘pueruli’ and develop into adults. As can be imagined, losses through natural predation are high.

Because of this prolonged larval ‘drift’ stage, a juvenile crayfish may settle a long way from where it was hatched. Scientists from NIWA have used ocean current data to simulate the travel of larval crayfish, showing a marked flow from south to north, except for the Chatham Islands and the North Island’s east coast, where crays appear to be localized populations.

One of the mysterious things about crayfish is their migrations or ‘marches’ in huge numbers, often over open bottoms during the day. Distances of 460km by reds and 1070km by packhorse have been recorded – a lot of walking on those skinny crayfish legs. One suggestion is that these ‘marches’ are to counter the northern drift of the larvae.

Crays move around, at night usually, looking for food, and have a preference for shellfish, crabs, seaweeds, small fish and sea urchins. They will eat anything dead however, and a fish frame is a common and successful bait for cray pots. There are also seasonal movements into shallow water for moulting, mating, and spawning.

Measurement
Captured crayfish must be measured and checked to ensure they are of legal size and condition. And don’t muck around if you have them out of the water; crays apparently go blind if exposed to the air for too long.
Get a good grip of them over the top of the back to avoid injuring the cray and yourself. They are strong and spiky, although legs and feelers can break off if put under pressure. They flap their tails vigorously and there are sharp spines underneath. Gloves are a good idea.

Firstly, remember, it is illegal to take crays in soft-shell (these will feel ‘rubbery’) or females carrying eggs under their tails. If the crays are in neither of these states, they must then be measured for size. In the unlikely event that the cray is a packhorse, it is measured by tail length, which has to be a minimum of 216mm, measured on the underside from the rear of the first calcified bar to the tip of the middle fan of the tail. By red cray standards, 216mm is a decent length, so even an apparently good-sized packhorse may not be legal.

Red crays are measured differently: from tip to tip of the large primary spines on the second calcified bar of the tail. Females have wider tails than males of the same size, so the measurements are different: 54mm for males and 60mm for females. Most people use gauges that are available from a number of sources. If the tail or spines are damaged at the measurement spot, even an obviously legal-sized bug must still be returned.

Some crays have inward-facing spines on their tails, while others angle out more. Because you must measure from tip-to-tip of the spines, this characteristic can make the difference between a cray being legal and undersized. Sometimes, otherwise reasonably sized crays have these in-facing spines and must be returned.

Because these ones get to do more breeding before coming ‘legal’, I guess this means the ‘inward facing spines’ characteristic will become more common over time. Generally, a red cray becomes legal-sized in 5-10 years, depending on the sex of the cray, the region, and individual growth rates.

Next month, in the conclusion to this feature, Sam gets down to the nuts, bolts and tricks of cray-potting, and the good bits: cooking and eating your crays.

- © Fairfax NZ News