The Second Alien Invasion
One arrived with claws. The second comes with a payment screen.
Spaghetti alle vongole
If you have a weakness for spaghetti alle vongole, let me give you a tip1: order it this summer as often as you can. The vongole -- clams -- are disappearing from Italian waters, and they’re disappearing quickly. Who knows how many summers they have left?
Why? Mostly because of the Atlantic blue crab, an unintended alien import that arrived in Italian waters via container ships that picked them up in ballast from the U.S.’s east coast.
With warmer seas and few natural predators, the northern Adriatic Sea has increasingly become a paradise for the crabs, and, in 2023, their population exploded. Their powerful claws tore through fishing nets and damaged traps, they fed on fish eggs, and, most seriously, they cracked open oysters, mussels … and clams.
Production of vongole veraci -- the most prized type of clam -- fell from nearly 22,000 tons in 2023, to just under 6,000 in 2024, to around 2,000 last year, and it will perhaps be less than 1,000 tons this year.
The Italian government has responded in the most Italian way possible: encouraging people to eat the vicious little creatures and creating a new government bureaucracy to study the situation.
Despite that, the crabs seem to be here to stay.
Waving off the change
At a recent lunch, the blue crab invasion came up in conversation. That’s when fellow Substacker, Eric Beall from Life Lived Italian, made a quip that helped inspire this essay.
“An unwanted American import that’s changing the way we eat out in Italy?” he asked. “Sounds like tipping.”
He has a strong point. Both the crabs and tipping culture traveled to Italy from the U.S. and have gained significant footholds in recent years. Both threaten long-standing traditions.
And tipping culture is the one that worries me more.
