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 ...
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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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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 ...
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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.
May 7, 2024
Continuing our summary of 2023 green crab status and trends
The momentum and dedication to extensive trapping for European green crab on Washington’s Pacific coastline continued to grow through 2023. Over the course of the year, nearly 355,000 green crabs were removed from the coastal estuaries and shorelines. Let’s take a closer look at what the catch data showed about population status and trends.
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