October 8, 2014 — The good news here is that for pennies we have an almost infinite local source for making crab risotto, etouffee, gumbo, soupe de poisson, cioppino, and bouillabaisse, any number of wonderful fish dishes made especially delicious with local crab stock at a cost of almost nothing. More good news: the crab risotto you serve your family does the ocean a world of good.
The bad news is that the source of all this goodness — green crabs, Carcinus maenas — are an invasive species that threaten, possibly on one hand’s number of years, to destroy shellfish beds from Cape Ann to Canada. No more white cardboard boxes brimming with fried clams. No more plump steamers bathed in butter. No more wild mussels shining in white wine, parsley, and garlic.
Carcinus maenas, native to central Norway, the Baltic Sea, and a small part of Iceland, arrived here most likely as ship ballast as early as 1810. DNA tracing reveals subsequent invasions, maybe as ship ballast, or nestled into seaweed used for packing, or shipped aquaculture. The green crab now makes appearances around the world. They own the Eastern seaboard as far south as South Carolina and as far north as Nova Scotia. They have infiltrated the Pacific coast from Baja, Calif., to Alaska, and far as Australia, earning the dubious accolade as one of the 100 most invasive species in the world.
At a green crab summit last year in Orono, Maine, Dr. Brian Beal, professor of Marine Biology at the University of Maine at Machias, declared there would be no shipment of Maine clam stock for 2015, as green crabs had that much compromised Maine’s soft shell clam beds. Our local Massachusetts market depends on Maine shipments, as there are not enough soft shell clams dug here to supply the appetite for fried clams, clam fritters, and steamers.
One green crab can eat 40 half-inch clams a day, or 30 small oysters. A half-acre wild mussel bed in Plum Island Sound, that locals considered an easy visit for a bushel of mussels, is gone, according to Rowley Shellfish Constable Jack Grundstrom. Green crabs also destroy native eel grass, a critical nursery for marine life, by burrowing into the mud, thus shredding the grasses at their base. Grundstrom actually points his 83-year-old finger right at green crabs for the collapse of the entire fishing industry, as these voracious beasts are devouring the food chain at its base.
“Most of the food for the entire ecosystem comes from the North Shore’s Great Marsh, (The Great Marsh is the largest continuous stretch of salt marsh in New England, extending from Cape Ann to New Hampshire, including over 20,000 acres of marsh, barrier beach, tidal river, estuary, mudflat, and upland islands extending from Gloucester to Salisbury.) Once that food is cut off, as green crabs are doing, all of our fishing culture is destroyed.”
Read the full story at the Gloucester Daily Times