Invasive European crabs are wreaking havoc in B.C. waters, harming native ecosystems — and refusing to leave. With food prices climbing, one First Nation says rather than dump them, we should eat them.
Imagine the worst house guests: demanding, confrontational, destructive. Uninvited and refusing to leave. Then their friends show up and suddenly the fridge is empty, the TV is broken and you’re sleeping on an air mattress on the balcony.
Almost half a million have been lured into commercial style prawn traps with pieces of frozen herring, their flat, jagged little bodies packed into large tubs and delivered to industrial freezers, where they are flash frozen in an icy death. Until early last summer, many were then left to rot at the landfill.“What a waste of protein that we’re throwing out the door,” he said in an interview.
But for the moment, Fisheries and Oceans Canada isn’t allowing anyone to eat the crabs the trapping teams catch. That was a “bit of a blow,” Hasheukumiss said. But he’s not giving up just yet: “I feel that we’re going to win this one.” The crabs are now well established on the east coast, where they’re taking a toll on commercial fisheries.
Yet, “you turn a rock crab bottom up and it will probably die bottom up because it can’t turn over,” she said.By the 1980s, the crabs reached California, this time hitchhiking aboard ships traversing the Panama Canal. From there, they rode ocean currents north. Put enough of them together and these relatively small crustaceans can “completely transform an estuary,” she said.
Green crabs aren’t picky eaters. They feast on everything from plants and detritus to worms, clams, snails and slugs, Therriault said. They’ve even been known to devour the young of other crab species. In the past, green crab larvae, thwarted by the cold, struggled to reach these northern areas, Therriault said.
During those times of year when the flow reverses, it has typically been too cold for any larvae pulled in to survive, he said. But warming waters increase the chance that any larvae that do drift into the Salish Sea not only survive, but thrive. There is some hope. Early results from Coastal Restoration Society’s pilot program in Ahousaht, Tla-o-qui-aht and T’Sou-ke territory show commercial-style trapping can help control populations.
From there, the crabs are sent to the freezers. Crabs from Sooke are later composted, but the piles removed from estuaries on the west coast are no longer sent to the dump. For now, they’re stockpiled in an industrial freezer with the idea that one day they’ll be used for something. “There are just thousands and thousands of places where green crab could be,” said Alex Davis, an ecologist and post-doctoral fellow at the University of California Los Angeles.
What’s not clear is where all the seagrass meadows are. Mapping meadows, mussel beds and other important areas could help governments make the best decisions about where to monitor and trap for green crab populations as the invasive crabs continue their insidious spread.Green crabs make a ‘tasty bisque’ and a ‘briny’ whiskey Not long ago, Hasheukumiss — with 40 or so green crabs in hand — looked to his mother and said: “Let’s look up some recipes.
Though Coutts, the Fisheries and Oceans Canada spokesperson, warned that “any capture, transport or use of [European green crab] for any purpose, including use as fertilizer, poses a risk in terms of promoting their spread,” there are signs Canada is changing the way it deals with aquatic invasive species.
With green crabs, however, it’s not that simple, she said. To the untrained eye, green crabs can be difficult to distinguish from local shore crabs. For one thing, green crabs aren’t always green and sometimes local species are.
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