June 13, 2025
Hello everyone!
I am so excited to serve as the new Crab Team graduate student assistant. I am passionate about both crab and citizen science, so I feel like I am definitely in the right place here amongst all these crabby people. I just finished my first year of graduate school at the University of Washington in the School of Marine and Environmental Affairs and I am currently working on my thesis which uses Dungeness crab data ...
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June 10, 2024
This spring, WSG Crab Team was joined by an undergraduate student assistant, Christopher Harris-Adams. Christopher Harris-Adams is currently pursuing his B.S. at UW’s College of the Environment researching microclimate variation in the greenhouse environment. We asked Christopher to share some of his story and introduce himself to the broader Crab Team community.
For quite a long time, I’ve been interested in the structure and ...
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June 9, 2025
Students at the University of Washington Friday Harbor Labs (FHL) found a green crab molt in False Bay on San Juan Island last weekend. This molt is the first evidence of green crabs found in False Bay and the first evidence since 2019 of green crabs in the San Juan Islands. In 2016, San Juan Island was the site of the first green crab confirmed along the Salish Sea ...
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June 2, 2025
Are you one of the millions of Washington residents living on or near the Salish Sea? Join the Salish Sea-wide Molt Blitz on June 20 to contribute to the largest single-day dataset of crab molts collected in our state.
Molts are the old shells that crabs shed when they grow. Collecting and recording these molts provides valuable data on which species of crab are present in an area, including invasive European green crab ...
Read MoreMay 14, 2025
By Luciana Calle, WSG Science Communications Fellow
On a sunny Wednesday morning, Aaron Barnett and Bridget Trosin, who manage the Clean Marina Washington Program, walked on the deck of Boat Street Marina, admiring one of the many marinas helping to protect Washington’s waters and marine life. In this marina, small black ducks swam between parked boats while geese sunbathed on the warm wooden panels of the deck, carefully preening their backs with their ...
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April 1, 2025
Today is the first day of the 2025 monitoring season and the Crab Team monitoring network is undergoing one of our biggest changes of the last decade. It is with very considered deliberation, discussion, and debate that we have decided to sunset the shoreline transect survey, one of the three sampling protocols that has been a part of the routine at Salish Sea Crab Team sites for nearly a decade.
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1
APR
When purchasing seafood for dinner, frozen is fresh!
Many people are unsure about the quality of frozen fish or shellfish at the market. The good news is, freezing technology has vastly improved over the last few decades. When it comes to seafood, frozen is a great option.
The Science of Flash Freezing
“Flash freezing” is the process of quickly lowering the temperature of freshly harvested seafood.
Old technologies froze fish slowly. This caused cells inside the flesh to ...
Read MoreMarch 3, 2025
By Maddie Gard, WSG Science Communications Fellow
When the Elwha River dams were breached in 2011, a century’s worth of accumulated sediment was released and transported downstream to the coastal zone. An estimated 19 million metric tons of mud, sand and gravel that had been trapped in the dam reservoirs transformed twists and turns of the Elwha River, eventually flushing out to the coast and reshaping the river delta near Port Angeles. Since then, Washington ...
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February 26, 2025
From humble beginnings spent daydreaming in 2014, from the first trap in the water in 2015, to a network of 307 active monitors across 68 sites: in 2024, Crab Team celebrated a decade of trudging around in the mud and counting crabs! A ...
February 13, 2025
In this post, we’ll continue our reflections back on 2024 through the lens of the status and trends of European green crabs in Washington. In the last post, we shared observations from trapping efforts across Salish Sea shorelines. Here we shift to shorelines on Washington’s Pacific coast.
As of writing this post, the total number of individual green crabs removed from Washington ...
Read MoreJanuary 6, 2025
It’s a season of new beginnings, and as we transition into the New Year, we continue to wrap up what 2024 meant in terms of the European green crab invasion in Washington. And as WSG Crab Team wraps up the 10th year of green crab monitoring, we also find ourselves reflecting on the last decade. In the next few blog posts, we aim to share some of these summaries and reflections. We will ...
December 16th, 2024
Your bin photos may feel as easy as the click of a button, but they are the essential step in the protocol that allows the Crab Team dataset to be used by researchers. Namely, they are the tool for validating all your findings in our data QC process. As data submitters know, Crab Team staff (Emily!) cross checks every single trapping sheet and photo from ...
Read MoreJuly 1, 2024
Thirteen Washington marinas have recertified under the state’s Clean Marina program so far in 2024.
To become a certified Clean Marina, a marina must meet a set of minimum pollution prevention requirements, identify sustainability goals and activities, and create a plan to achieve them over a three-year period. For example, a ...
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June 18, 2024
When it comes to interactions between crabs, whether of the same species or of differing species, size matters. When crabs run into each other out on tide flats, in lagoons, or channels, they might compete for food or shelter, or they may actually try to prey on each other. In these encounters, the general rule of #CrabLife is that bigger crabs win over smaller crabs. So knowing the size of not only green ...
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May 23, 2024
This winter, WSG Crab Team was joined by a second graduate student assistant, Zach Bengtsson. Zach is currently pursuing his Ph.D. at UW’s School of Aquatic and Fishery Sciences researching stress responses of marine invertebrates. We asked Zach to share some of his story with us to introduce himself to the broader Crab Team community.