Begun, the crab uprising has.
It’s Dana Lyons follow-up to Cows with Guns … called Crabs with Napalm.
Good Lord, is that show still on?
In reality, isn’t the billion crab number just based on estimates from the Department of Fish and Game of the number of crab in the wild? Is it possible that their estimates were just wildly inaccurate?
If they are, then they’ve been wildly inaccurate for decades.
It seems to me that it’s hard enough to properly estimate the population of a wild species on land, but in the ocean, it must be ten times harder.
I suspect that, much like flood risk estimations from FEMA, the crab count estimate from the AK Fish & Game might, just might, have been gently massaged for years a few percent in the optimistic direction to enable a larger catch quota as demanded by the legislators who control their budget.
if you add (or multiply) a few percent extra repeatedly to a number, pretty soon it gets well away from reality. But oddly enough, real reality, not political or sales reality always wins in the end.
Perhaps they are marching south to wage war on the green crabs! That’d be frikkin awesome!
So long, and thanks for all the crabs.
I suspect this is part of it.
I think it’s terrifying like the bee populations greatly reducing.
It’s the crab rapture.
Crapture.
Here come the crab jokes - just dont be shellfish.
Yeah, this is really bad news. Who knew that crabs would be the canary in the climate coal mine?
If the crabs start crossbreeding with the bees in a desperate measure to support both their fading lineages soon we’ll have an infestation of swarming flying crabs. Or maybe stinging sea-bottom creatures.
Let’s hope for the latter. Swarms of flying crabs are not a sight I want to see.
The canary croaked decades years ago. These crabs are dead coal miners strewn about the mine while management insists all is well.
There’s a possibility the crabs just moved somewhere else thanks to climate change. The ocean floor has a multitude of mountains, valleys, and canyons that can go for years without having a crab pot dropped onto/into them.
I was shopping at the local Kroger this morning and expected to see prices for snow crab, if they even had any, would be astronomical. But they had plenty, and it was $18/lb. ($16 with Kroger card). Which ain’t cheap, but not nearly as bad as King crab, which is up to like $40/lb. around here, and that’s for sad-looking puny little leg segments.
Seems like not that many years ago I remember Costco selling King crab legs as long as my arm. You’d crack a leg and pull out a piece of crab meat as big as a kielbasa. Those days are gone.
So I almost bought a couple lbs. of snow crab this morning, but I didn’t. Not sure why…maybe I didn’t want to remind myself how much I love crab.
Is Dungeness crab overfished / disappearing too? That used to be my favorite kind of crab, but I hardly ever see it in the stores anymore.
A month or so ago I noticed 10-pound boxes of king crab legs at Costco. They were $400.
It’s about the only kind you see here (since this is where they come from). Currently, live crabs are $20/pound. (Whole cooked ones are $22/pound, and ‘gutted’ - just the bits with meat in them – and cooked are $29/pound. But who wants to buy a dead crab?)
I counter the previous reply with a hearty “Good on you”!