September 6th, 2019
Last week, Crab Team Program Manager, Emily Grason, and Program Assistant, Kelly Martin, conducted a trapping assessment on San Juan Island with Chelsey Buffington and Roy Clark from the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife (WDFW). After three days and more than 330 trap sets, one male European green crab (64 mm) was found in Westcott Bay.
Westcott Bay, on the northern end of San Juan Island, is the location of the very first ...
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August 22, 2019
Crab Team volunteers in Drayton Harbor, just south of the border with Canada, found the shell of an invasive European green crab while walking the beach this past Saturday. The detection is the furthest northward along Washington shorelines the invasive species has been confirmed.
Margaret Santamaria and Margarette Grant are part of the Crab Team crew at a monitoring site on California Creek. They made the discovery while they were conducting a survey nearby for another citizen science project, ...
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August 13, 2019
Growers working with Taylor Shellfish captured a female European green crab while working in oyster beds last week. This crab is the fourth that has been found in Samish Bay this year, the first three detections occurring in early January. At about 75mm (~3″) across the back shell, this crab was relatively large for a female, but had a thin, pliable shell, indicating she had recently molted. Growers noticed the crab while processing an oyster pallet, removed ...
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July 17, 2019
Drenched and muddy, but greatly relieved, we packed all 150 traps out of the Pysht estuary this morning. Over the past three days, in partnership with the Lower Elwha Klallam Tribe and Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife, Crab Team staff participated in an expanded assessment trapping effort that resulted in roughly 300 trap sets, and, most importantly, zero detections of European green crabs.
The Pysht river estuary is a huge and beautiful marsh, with miles of muddy channels, ...
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July 8, 2019
Last week was a busy one for European green crab monitoring on Washington’s inland shorelines. Two expanded trapping efforts were taking place simultaneously at the beginning of the week, with mixed results. The first, a trapping effort in Whatcom County conducted by Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife (WDFW) Technician, Chelsey Buffington, turned up three European green crab in Chuckanut Bay. WDFW conducted this trapping in response to the recent discovery of a green ...
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June 3, 2019
One strength of the Crab Team protocol is that it enables us to confidently compare findings among sites, and track changes over time – even if different people are doing the sampling. With sampling on this scale, even the small steps can be important to what we learn from the data. Protocol in Focus allows us to expand on these details, and offer an opportunity to see all the behind-the-scenes planning that goes into methodology.
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3
JUN
May 30, 2019
The remains of a European green crab were found in Squalicum Harbor in Bellingham earlier this week, the first evidence of the global invader confirmed in Whatcom County. Casey Pruett, director of the Marine Life Center, noticed a gull feeding on the carcass at the boat ramp immediately adjacent to the center, recognized it as a European green crab, and reported to Angela Foster, the on duty WDFW agent at the harbor. Most of the ...
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May 13, 2019
The return of spring means trapping season for green crab is now under way. In April, WSG Crab Team resumed early detection trapping across the monitoring network along Washington’s inland shorelines. We’re pleased to share that Crab Team has received funding to continue this work for the next biennium (July 2019 – June 2021) in the Washington State budget. To date, the program was funded primarily through the Puget Sound Marine and Nearshore Grant Program (US Environmental ...
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January 23, 2019
Three European green crab have been found in Samish Bay, north of Mt. Vernon, a new detection location for the globally-damaging invasive on Washington’s inland shorelines.
The three adult crabs, including an egg-bearing (gravid) female and two males, were captured by shellfish growers working for Taylor Shellfish Farms on three successive nights in early January. The growers recognized the crabs as invasive while handling oysters and sorting out other animals, and quickly reported them to Washington Department of ...
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November 1, 2018
The turning of the leaves signals a winding-down of green crab trapping activities. Just as it feels right to us to hunker down and stay warm, cooler water temperatures also cause green crab to become less catchable in the fall and winter. Crab Team monitors have pulled and stored their last traps, and, as of today, all of the data are into Crab Team HQ here in Seattle. While we have provided snapshots and updates ...
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September 25, 2018
WSG Crab Team volunteers at Kala Point, near Port Townsend, captured a single European green crab during their final early detection sampling effort for the 2018 season on September 8. In follow up trapping efforts in the area, staff from Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife (WDFW) captured an additional green crab at Scow Bay, a marshy area between Indian and Marrowstone Islands. The two captures add to the list of sites at which green crab have been ...
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September 10, 2018
One strength of the Crab Team protocol is that it enables us to confidently compare findings among sites, and track changes over time – even if different people are doing the sampling. With sampling on this scale, even the small steps can be important to what we learn from the data. Protocol in Focus allows us to expand on these details, and offer an opportunity to see all the behind-the-scenes planning that goes into methodology.
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SEP
August 8th, 2018
Last month, Washington Sea Grant Crab Team staff traveled to the Makah Reservation in the northwest corner of the Olympic Peninsula to participate in the Makah Tribe’s European green crab trapping efforts. As you might remember, in October of 2017, we reported the very first sighting of a green crab in Makah Bay. Since then, Adrianne Akmajian, Marine Ecologist for the Makah Tribe, has been leading extensive trapping efforts to better understand and manage the population ...
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July 5th, 2018
As we wrote last week, the first half of this monitoring season has seen several new detections of European green crab, but as green crab appear to be ramping up, so is the group of humans ready to control them. WSG Crab Team is now a project with five team members (including two full time staff), more than 200 volunteers, and 25 partner staff from agencies and tribes. That’s a lot of people ...
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June 29, 2018
The first half of the 2018 WSG Crab Team monitoring season is coming to a close, and with that comes a status update on European green crab in Washington’s Salish Sea. Since April, live green crab or molts have been detected at five sites, two of which are new detection sites: