February 27, 2014 — An eight-legged mollusk with a big appetite has once again threatened to wreck Lee County’s commercial stone crab season.
Hordes of octopuses have invaded the area and are turning trapped stone crabs into piles of shell fragments.
“They’re real thick offshore; past 30 feet deep, we’re catching a lot of them,” commercial fisherman Shane Dooley said. “Some traps have two or three in them. They eat the crabs as soon as they get in, and they go from trap to trap.”
All of Island Crab Co. owner Jeff Haugland’s traps are in 40 to 55 feet of water.
“It’s like a desert out there,” he said. “My boats are seeing plenty of octopus, and they’re seeing no stone crab, almost less than none. They brought in 100 traps yesterday and four pounds of claws. Two days before that, they pulled 98 traps and got one claw.”
Octopuses are a stone crab’s and a commercial stone crabber’s worst nightmare.
They’re voracious predators; they love stone crabs; they can easily crawl into and out of stone crab traps; and they’re smart.
“I have thousands of hours working with them; they’re amazing animals,” said octopus expert Ron Toll, provost and vice president for academic affairs at FGCU. “They’ll go where the food is. They’ll also go where the shelter is. If they find a place where they can grab a crab in a pot, they will. Then they’ll move 20 meters away, hunker down, and wait for the next round of crab. These are very bright animals.”
Read the full story at the Fort Meyers News-Press