Researchers in New England only recently recognized the trove of knowledge Venetian fishers have about the crab’s life cycle, and this resource has proved key to helping get efforts off the ground with the slightly different European species. This market, however, has never taken off in the U.S.-in part because it is difficult to determine when the crabs are about to molt, or shed their old shell, exposing the softness chefs seek. Green crabs are too small to warrant this time-consuming effort, but the ease of serving them whole with a soft shell-legs, innards, claws and all-appeals to both chefs and diners. The crabs have a rich, delicate flavor and can be fried and eaten whole in their soft-shell form, eliminating the tedious task of picking meat out of limbs, as with hard-shell crabs. A soft-shell market for closely related Mediterranean green crabs already exists in Venice, where they have been considered a delicacy for centuries. Credit: Laura Poppick An Invasive DelicacyĮuropean green crabs are native to coastal waters from northern Africa to Norway and first arrived on the East Coast of North America in ship ballast and stuck to hulls in the early 1800s. She estimates she has processed more than 5,000 crabs just this year.
Gabriela Bradt holds a European green crab she caught during a routine survey nearby Portsmouth, N.H. But before this treat can become a regular menu offering, she and her colleagues must unravel details about green crabs’ biology to pinpoint when to harvest them. “The crabs will sell themselves,” says Bradt, whose team has already connected with 15 local chefs interested in serving them soft-shell. Now, as New England waters warm and threaten to further boost populations, Bradt and her colleagues in Maine hope their soft-shell plan might weaken the crustaceans’ grip and bolster the local fishing industry at the same time. The Canadian Department of Fisheries and Oceans describes European green crabs as “one of the ten most unwanted species in the world,” and biologists have struggled to slow the animals’ spread with intermittent trapping and removal alone. With an appetite for more than 30 different plant and animal species, the crabs ravage commercial shellfisheries, destroy coastal seagrass beds and fundamentally shift ecosystems where they take hold. It is one of many desperate attempts across North America to cull the species, which has steadily multiplied from Maryland to Nova Scotia and from California to southern British Columbia. Bradt, a fisheries specialist at the University of New Hampshire, is stockpiling these abundant (and aggressively invasive) crustaceans in an effort to study their biology-and to launch the country’s first green-crab soft-shell fishery.
She grabs the crab, jots down its size and color on her clipboard and drops it into a bucket with several others.
“There’s one,” she says, pointing to the mottled brownish-green back of a European green crab sidestepping across the matching mud. The rasps of something scuttling emerge from underneath the mound.
On a rocky mudflat nestled between a few islands off Portsmouth, N.H., Gabriela Bradt rustles a clump of seaweed and shifts her ear toward the ground.
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