So, I know this is digging up a really old thread, but this popped up on my search results and I wanted to correct something above. You absolutely can cook dead crabs as long as YOU know HOW LONG they’ve been dead. If you’re crabbing and you have your catch on ice in a cooler, you can cook them all even if some of them die. Eating a crab that you find dead and don’t know how long it’s been dead is very dangerous. The reason crabbers have to throw away “dead loss” is because they’re out for weeks at a time and there’s no way to know how long the crab has been dead.