WHO SAYS THERE’S no good news? Lately, the co-managers of our natural resources have stumbled upon a unique method of dealing with a devastating threat to our marine resources, the invasive green crab.
The green crab was first noticed in Washington in Willapa Bay in 1961. They have invaded our waters from California to British Columbia since then.
According to experts, green crab can dig down 6 inches and eat 40 half-inch clams a day. While they can’t crack open a mature oyster, they can kill the small ones while digging up the eelgrass beds, which are critical habitat for many species of marine life from salmon to Dungeness crab.
In 2022, Washington state declared war on green crabs, forking over almost $9 million for a committee to study the problem. Then, in their wisdom, they made it illegal in Washington to collect or possess a green crab.
While the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife admitted it was “counterintuitive” to not allow people to harvest or eat green crab, they insisted Washingtonians were too ignorant to tell the difference between a green crab and our native crab.
This, despite the fact that fishers in Washington state must currently be able to identify eight species of trout, five species of salmon and 12 species of rockfish the WDFW fishing rules pamphlet describes as “challenging to identify.” Failure to correctly identify the different species can result in fines, forfeiture of fishing gear and extreme embarrassment.
Meanwhile, just across the border in Oregon, people are a whole lot smarter than the rubes in Washington. In Oregon, you can keep 35 green crab a day. Oregon suggests cooking the green crab. They are considered delicious fried, boiled or sautéed. Green crab roe is considered gourmet. Green crab are raised on fish farms to feed the demand.
Massachusetts put a bounty on green crab and started fishing them commercially, catching 12,000 tons a year. In Connecticut, restaurants are now serving green crab that have invaded Long Island Sound with the motto, “if you can’t beat them, eat them.”
This latest culinary trend is illegal in Washington, where scientists are still studying the problem of this devastating invasive species. Currently, important research is being conducted at Neah Bay, where biologists from Western Washington University are collecting otter dung to determine if these apex predators are consuming green crab in a protocol entitled, “molecular scatology.”
Preliminary results have indicated that, yes, indeed, the otters are eating the green crab. In 2021, according to the WWU press release, 1,000 invasive green crab were trapped near Neah Bay.
By protecting the green crab, an average of 10,000 of these invasive environmental threats are now trapped there every year.
While the green crab may threaten our native species, properly managed, these marine invaders provide a vital funding source for myriad government agencies that study and manage this threat with the best available science for the good of all the agencies involved. It’s the highest and best use of an invasive species.
The implications of this important green crab research are revolutionary. The study has indicated that, as the green crab population explodes along our coastline, the otters are eating more of them.
This is significant because it would indicate that, by expanding this vital research into this rare opportunity, it is increasingly possible to get a job studying otter dung.
Someday, it may be possible to envision packs of specially trained otters roaming our coastline catching crabs and depositing abundant piles of dung for biologists of the future to genetically analyze.
Green crabs are doomed. This otter work!
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Pat Neal is a Hoh River fishing and rafting guide and “wilderness gossip columnist” whose column appears here every Wednesday.
He can be reached at 360-683-9867 or by email via patnealproductions@gmail.com.