FREEPORT, Maine — August 18, 2014 — As researchers from Casco Bay to Frenchman Bay study the lifestyle and diet of invasive European green crabs in an effort to control the predators, a North Carolina company hopes to find Mainers willing to sell the creeping crustaceans to be processed into cat food.
Bay City Crab purchased two tractor-trailer loads — a total of 22,000 pounds — of crabs earlier this summer from Boothbay Harbor-area harvesters and processed them at their plant based in Aurora, North Carolina. The firm then shipped the crabmeat to a cat food company, plant manager Chrissy Fulcher said Friday.
Fulcher would not disclose the name of the company to which she sold the processed crabs, but she said Bay City Crab — which processes domestic blue crabs “for five-star restaurants in New York and Boston” — has found a market for the green crab that has devoured shoreline habitat and threatened the $16 million softshell clam industry in Maine.
But just as the state of Maine loosened regulations around selling green crabs, the men who were selling to Fulcher said they were done. The 25 cents a pound she was paying “just wasn’t worth it [to them],” Fulcher said. “[One harvester] said he wasn’t catching the numbers [to make it worthwhile].”
Fulcher acknowledged the “very small price” but said other costs associated with the business — packaging the crabs in Maine, transporting them to North Carolina, manpower and transporting them to the cat food processing plant — made it impossible to pay more.
“We took the trailer up there and dropped it off in his yard,” Fulcher said. “We provided the vats and the pallets and everything. All he really had to do was go and dump them in the vat.”
In June, Fulcher and her husband traveled along Maine’s coastline, handing out business cards. Bay City Crab also has advertised in publications, including the Boothbay Register, hoping to find others interested in selling green crabs to them. She said many have contacted her since, but there have been no takers so far.
“I think the price probably plays into it,” she said. “I told a lot of them I’m hoping that if they would bear with us this year, we could make the market strong. And next year we might be able to raise [the price] a little bit.”
Read the full story from the Bangor Daily News