May 4, 2026
Crab Team likes to shine a light on the creatures we encounter in our muddy environments, from the rare and far-out, to the common and familiar, each of the species in Washington estuaries plays a role in local ecology. They also have a story to tell when they appear in Crab Team monitoring traps. In September of 2025, two separate network monitoring sites in Grays Harbor both captured Pacific tomcod. A grand total of ...
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April 29, 2026
Hello Crab Team Community!
I’m excited to be back with you all as the new Crab Team Outreach Specialist! I had the pleasure of meeting some of you and entering lots of your data during the 2022 and 2023 seasons when I was a Crab Team student assistant. In my new role, I’m looking forward to reconnecting, meeting those I haven’t yet, and finally putting faces to all the familiar names. ...
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April 23, 2026
Shellfish growers have long been stewards of Washington’s rich marine waters. After all, the industry as a whole relies on healthy marine ecosystems. So it probably comes as no surprise that shellfish growers have been partners in efforts to control invasive European green ...
January 26, 2026
Washington’s Pacific coast has a different European green crab history than the Salish Sea and faces different conditions, so here we share a summary of 2025 green crab status and trends focused on sites within coastal estuaries. This summary is based on data collected by all trapping groups working in this geography (see the footer for a list).
Where they are found in Washington green crabs are roughly 10 times more abundant at ...
Read MoreJanuary 5, 2026
Last year continued Washington’s trend of increasing green crab activity, both in the number of crabs trapped and in the growing network of people working to find and remove them. In early December, Washington Sea Grant (WSG) brought together trappers from across the state to compare notes from the 2025 season – our biggest Trappers’ Summit to date! We’re sharing highlights from those conversations in two annual summary posts. This post focuses on ...
November 25, 2025
La Conner, Wash. — In late September, the molt from a European green crab was found at Similk Beach, on the northern end of the Swinomish Tribal Reservation. This was the first detection of the highly invasive species in the northern Whidbey Basin, which includes Skagit Bay.
Community member Shirley Hoh made the discovery while participating in a routine search as part of Molt ...
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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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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 ...