AKIPRESS.COM - Swedish authorities pleaded with the European Union earlier this month to help them close their borders – not to humans, but to lobsters arriving on their shores from America, Vice News reports.

The Swedish Environment Ministry said more than 30 American lobsters, or those that are typically found off the coast of Maine, have been found in Sweden's coastal waters.

The ministry said the foreign lobsters "can carry diseases and parasites that could spread to the European lobster and result in extremely high mortality." It asked the European Union to list American lobsters as a foreign species that would ban it from being imported.

"I've heard rumors about this," said Winsor Watson, a lobster specialist and director of education at the University of New Hampshire's School of Marine Science and Ocean Engineering.

Lobsters can walk about two miles a day, Watson said. Migrations are seasonal and are typically driven by water temperatures. Migration patterns have shifted north "a bit" as Atlantic Ocean temperatures have warmed, he said.

"Lobsters are capable of long-distance migrations, although this is a little extreme," Watson said.

James Manning of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Marine Fisheries Service noted that it would take over a year for lobsters to travel to Sweden if they were being carried along by ocean currents, and said he wasn't sure whether it was realistic to think that lobsters could make their way to Sweden in the warmth of the Gulf Stream.

Gro van der Meeren of the Norwegian Institute of Marine Research, however, said the reason why lobsters are moving abroad has more to do with humans, particularly Swedish ones who have imported American lobsters, than the behavior of the lobsters themselves. Some of the lobsters may have escaped from crates while in transit, she said.

The first American lobsters were detected in Norway in 1999. Since then, others were found in waters off of Denmark, Sweden, and the United Kingdom.

Epizootic shell disease, which causes black lesions and sometimes death in American lobsters, has been found in female American lobsters inhabiting European waters. One female American lobster was pregnant with embryos of "viable hybrids," meaning mating between Maine and European creatures has occurred.

The EU Invasive Alien Species regulation was enacted in January 2015 and aims "to protect native biodiversity and ecosystem services, as well as to minimize and mitigate the human health or economic impacts that [invasive] species can have."