Laws and claws

In hopping around some of the forums where Marmorkrebs have been mentioned, a recurring question has come up about the laws on keeping and shipping crayfish. Is is legal to have Marmorekrebs, to ship them to another country, and so on.

I don't know. I've seen some comments that in the U.S., the rules about importing and keeping crayfish vary from state to state. I haven't done an exhaustive search on this, but it's come up a few times, so I think I may have to do it sometime soon.

Second, this is one of those times where science moves faster than law. This actually happens fairly often. A particularly interesting example was when a court had to rule on whether whales were fish. Marmorkrebs weren't known to science until a few years ago, still doesn't have a proper species name, still not known if it exists in the wild (other than where it has been introduced). I imagine that makes it sort of difficult to draft laws concerning it. But the law usually catches up...