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 ...
Read More
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 ...
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.
Read More
7
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 ...
Read More
August 9, 2022
Crab Team volunteer monitors have been working in Chuckanut Bay since 2017, and just last month they pulled up their first live green crab during monthly sampling. The crab was a larger (77mm) older female, indicating she’d been present at the site for at least three or four years.
In 2019, three green crabs were captured by Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife in assessment trapping. Since that time, no further live captures have been made, including in ...
Read More
June 8, 2022
The amazing volunteers who make up Washington Sea Grant’s Crab Team have done it again, detecting a basketful of green crabs before they became a truckload. Part of what makes this event particularly significant is that it’s in Hood Canal, a basin of the Salish Sea where green crabs had not previously been detected.
During their regular monthly monitoring in May, the team at Nick’s Lagoon near Seabeck caught ...
Read More
January 20, 2022
Trapping throughout 2021 indicates that the European green crab invasion has grown across Washington’s coastal estuaries, namely Willapa Bay, Grays Harbor, and Makah Bay. This year’s collaborative efforts by many partners to remove crabs and track the invasion also confirmed that green crabs are more abundant and widespread in these locations than they are along inland shorelines, and will likely continue to increase.
2021 marked the second year of intensive and systematic trapping for European green ...
Read More
December 6, 2021
The recent report by the Lummi Nation of more than 70,000 European green crabs captured this year has many wondering what this could mean for efforts to prevent green crabs from establishing in the Salish Sea. This number certainly indicates that the population of green crabs within the sea pond on the Lummi Reservation has grown exponentially since their first detection in 2019 (Mueller and Jefferson, ...
Read More
December 23, 2020
One of the big successes this year was the launch of a local removal effort in Drayton Harbor. In spite of COVID, in spite of wildfire smoke, in spite of everything that 2020 had to throw at us, the collaborative management team was able to make great strides in trapping the Washington’s northernmost green crab hotspot. From May through October of this year, the crew was out trapping, trapping, and … trapping, with two ...
Read More
December 16, 2020
As we hang up our hip boots to dry until next season (right next to the holiday lights, of course), it’s a good time to stop and reflect on what we were able to accomplish in a fleeting field season that was truly unlike any before it. In addition to our continued early detection monitoring in the Salish Sea, we had ambitious goals to design and launch a broad geographic ...
Read More
November 23, 2020
Trapping for European green crab has mostly concluded for the 2020 season, enabling us to take stock of all that was accomplished this year and provide some status updates on green crab. The obstacles this year were considerable, but volunteers and managers were more than equal to the task, masking, attesting, and distancing, not to mention riding out wildfire smoke, to trap for green crabs. The next few posts will provide updates on what was accomplished and what ...
Read More
July 3, 2020
Removal of European green crab in Drayton Harbor is now underway, thanks to the collaborative efforts of WSG, Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife (WDFW), the Northwest Straits Commission (NWSC) and other stakeholders. This is the second of two posts on efforts to date. Part 1 covered the development of the management team.
Removal trapping of European green crabs at Drayton Harbor officially began on May 26. Since then, staff with Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife (WDFW) ...
Read More
May 8, 2020
Like so many other projects and programs right now, partners contributing to state-wide efforts to manage European green crabs are trying to figure out what can safely be done, in the midst of the global pandemic, to address the urgent threat of invasion. In particular, there has been concern that green crabs won’t wait until COVID-related isolation measures are lifted to continue their population growth and spread, and that we could miss a critical ...
Read More
October 22, 2019
Broadening the search for invasive European green crab in Drayton Harbor, Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife and WSG Crab Team captured additional European green crab in recent weeks. In addition, Lummi Natural Resources has reported capturing green crab in Lummi Bay as a result of early detection trapping, expanding the list of new sites where green crab have been confirmed in Whatcom County this year.
Following the discovery of several molted green ...
Read More