This is the remarkable moment a crayfish escaped certain death in a bowl of soup by chopping off one of its claws. A video posted on the Chinese social media site Weibo showed the small crustacean struggling out of a bowl of piping hot spicy soup. But the creature realised one of its claws was slowing its escape and without any hesitation used its other claw to slice it off and wriggle free. The dramatic footage, posted by a user called Juke, has now been shared around the world and viewed more than a million times. Many Weibo users had called for the resourceful crayfish to be shown mercy. One said "Let him go" and another wrote "don't eat him, seeing how hard he's trying to survive", the Taiwan News website reported. But Juke said he had already decided to let the inventive crustacean live."I let him live, I already took him home and am raising him in an aquarium," he replied.
Crayfish were first introduced to China in the 1920s and were initially seen as a pest by rice farmers for digging in their paddy fields. But they have surged in popularity as a delicacy in recent years and China is now the world's largest producer. A report by the country's ministry of agriculture last year said that production of crayfish had more than tripled to 850,000 tonnes, 70% of the world's output.