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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MAY
April 10, 2024
While 2023 already seems like an eon ago, last year’s trapping season is still very much on our minds even as we launch the 2024 monitoring effort. The winter is a time for green crab managers to regroup, review data to interpret green crab population patterns and think about strategies for the coming year. In December, WSG hosted our third annual Trapper’s Summit, a day-long workshop for trapping partners all over the state to come and ...
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November 17, 2023
We are Crab Team after all, so it’s perhaps no surprise that we are not shy about getting up to our elbows in details about the crabs we catch. But what can we actually learn from looking at size data of crabs? What makes handling all the angry pinchers worthwhile?
We’re covering this rich topic in two issues of Protocol in Focus. This time, we’ll shed light on what we can ...
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September 20, 2023
Hello WSG Crab Team Community!
My name is Elyse Kelsey and I am thrilled to be joining Crab Team as a Student Assistant. I just missed the field season this year but I am excited to meet and work alongside the incredible volunteers and partners that make this work possible next summer! For the next few months, I will be keeping busy by entering data, managing field gear, and offering administrative support from ...
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June 15, 2023
As we dive into the 2023 European green crab trapping season, it’s important to reflect on the insights gained from the coastal green crab populations in 2022. This summary of green crab observations from Washington’s coastal estuaries complements our Inland 2022 wrap-up, rounding out our focus on the trends and patterns observed from green crab trapping results across the state. We pulled from several different data sources to piece together an ...
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May 1, 2023
WSG and WSU Extension have teamed up to launch a new volunteer-based early detection program to complement the existing Crab Team monitoring network—introducing, Molt Search.
Molt search builds on the hard work of Crab Team monitors who have been conducting early detection surveys since 2015. The network has found some of the first generations ...
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March 13, 2023
Crab Team has come a long way since a handful of intrepid early-adopter volunteers put their boots in the mud for our pilot season in August 2015. Since that time, the network has:
February 9, 2023
Hello Crab Team community!
My name is Lisa Watkins and I’m thrilled to be joining you all as Washington Sea Grant’s new Community Science Specialist. A large part of my role will be to coordinate the Crab Team monitoring network, aiming to make participation–from recruitment and training to data reporting and beyond—as meaningful and smooth-running as possible.
As a network, Crab Team has set a standard of what meaningful, management-relevant community science efforts can look like, and ...
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December 31 2022
We spend a lot of time thinking about how to quantify green crab efforts and numbers to understand status and trends. Suffice to say that any way you slice it, any way you define and quantify metrics, 2022 was a big year in Washington for European green crab management. With the launch of the Governor’s Emergency Order and WDFW-coordinated response measures, this year brought ...
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