Microchipping technology doesn’t just come into use for your pet cat or dog.

Microchipping is now being used to keep track of our populations of giant freshwater crayfish here in NW Tasmania.

Our giant lobsters are listed as vulnerable, but to date it has been hard to accurately track the population and find out about population movements, growth rate and ages. Other tagging methods haven’t lasted more than a year.

The project is being managed by Todd Walsh of NW Waterwatch. More commonly known as ‘The Lobster Man’, Todd has now been studying our freshwater lobster populations for more than ten years.

‘The biggest threat to the lobster is water turbidity, which causes sedimentation,’ Todd said. ‘And this can be due to agricultural or forestry activities that cause major disturbance to stream banks.’

To find out how the lobster populations are being affected by water quality, Todd has been monitoring water quality of catchments throughout the Northwest for the past three years. He says he now has enough data to be able to analyse.

Whilst the more pristine catchments such as the Inglis sub catchments have healthy populations, Todd says there have been some surprises in the locations where the lobsters have been found, such as in the Calder River, where there is more agricultural and forestry activity than in the Inglis sub catchments.

The giant freshwater crayfish occur in the catchments flowing into Bass Strait (except the Tamar) as well as the Arthur River catchment. Todd is working to ensure that this is enough suitable habitat for the lobsters to survive in the long term. ‘The real issue is making sure there is habitat in the upper catchment,’ he said. ‘There is no point in protecting downstream if the upper catchment waters don’t have a suitable buffer from activities such as forestry, mining and agriculture. Otherwise the sediments are washed down and the lobsters can’t survive. What happens upstream gets taken downstream.’

To date ten lobsters have been microchipped, and Todd plans to have 1000 micro-chipped in the next three to four years.