Crab Team News

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 ...

 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 ...

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:

• One male green crab (57.5 mm carapace width) was captured during a follow-up assessment at Lagoon Point

June 11, 2018

Last week, WSG Crab Team spent three full days in the mud at Lagoon Point on Whidbey Island. After two European green crab were discovered there last year, one during regular volunteer monitoring and a second during the subsequent rapid assessment, Crab Team HQ decided another multi-day trapping assessment could help us better understand the status of green crab at the site. ...

November 15, 2016

This series of three posts was originally written in August, but was pre-empted by the news of European green crab captures on San Juan Island and in Padilla Bay. Better late than never, here are our field notes on green crab trapping in Willapa Bay during August of this year. Read part 1 and part 2

Day 4: August 17 – wrapping up

Because we were camping literally right next to the marsh we were trapping, we got to sleep in ...

November 8, 2016

This series of three posts was originally written in August, but was pre-empted by the news of European green crab captures on San Juan Island and in Padilla Bay. Better late than never, here are our field notes on green crab trapping in Willapa Bay during August of this year. Read part 1.

Day 2: August 15

Up at 5 am to catch first light at 6. Back to Oysterville to pick up the traps – no green crabs, but a ...

October 18, 2016

You’ve heard a lot from us about sightings of the European green crabs that have occurred over the past two months. But we thought you would enjoy hearing about the experience of the first discovery from the Crab Team volunteers who made it. Craig Staude captains the group of 4 Crab Team volunteers who sample monthly at Westcott Bay. He wrote an article on the experience Sylvia Yamada, Oregon State University researcher and green crab expert, for