news story / By Heidi Walters

A Crab’s Life

(Jan. 26, 2012)  On the north coast of California, humans have been spearing, grabbing or enticing Cancer magister into traps since time immemorial. In those early days, people boiled their crab in hot sand or roasted it in fire and gobbled it up; the table wasn’t far from the crab’s home.

These days, however, some of our locally grown Dungeness crabs may travel, alive, thousands of miles before dying in a Beijing or Shanghai kitchen and being consumed by a delighted member of the growing Chinese middle class.

Felixnando Martinez, left, and Arturo Bertran band Dungeness crab at Wild Planet Foods’ processing shed near the new Fisherman’s Terminal. PHOTO BY HEIDI WALTERS

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This fate is becoming more and more common — the result of a combination of increased demand and, in recent years, a prodigious crab catch. (Much of the California crab comes from Crescent City and Eureka, the ports with the most landings in a normal year, although last year central California’s crab catch blew the rest of the bunch out of the water, said Peter Kalvass, an environmental scientist with the California Department of Fish and Game.)

In calendar year 2009, according to figures gathered by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, California exported 25,000 pounds of live Dungeness crab overseas, mostly to China. In 2010, the state exported 250,000 pounds. And in 2011, just through August, it exported 445,000 pounds. The total amount exported from the United States — Oregon, Washington and California — overseas (again, mostly to China), rose from 221,532 pounds to 1.4 million pounds from 2009 to 2010. By July 2011, the U.S. had already exported 2.2 million pounds. Even more U.S. Dungeness is going to China, however, by way of Canada — more than 16.6 million pounds in 2011, according to NOAA. (None of these figures include exports of canned and frozen crab, which also have increased.)

Washington State used to be the main live-crab exporter, until Oregon and California fish processors jumped in. Local buyer and fish processor Bill Carvalho, president of Wild Planet Foods, based in McKinleyville, began exporting live crab to China in 2009. He ships live crab across the United States, too. While he won’t reveal how much he exports to China, he allows it’s “significant.” Carvalho buys from crabbers from Crescent City to Eureka to San Francisco; the animals get their claws rubberbanded (so they don’t hurt each other) here in Eureka inside a crab-banding shed next to the new Fisherman’s Terminal at the foot of C Street. Then they’re trucked down to San Mateo County, where they’re specially packaged and boarded onto passenger planes.

The final voyage of one of these China-bound live Dungies, from ocean floor to supper dish, could take as little as two and a half frenzied processing days. A strange end, if you think about it, for the orange-shelled fellow with the distinctive goat’s head pattern on his back, who began his independent life just a few years before as a tiny hatchling larva floating on the surface of the ocean with the rest of the zooplankton.

Here in Humboldt, a Dungeness crab’s life cycle begins in the “near-shore” ocean environment, in anywhere from 30 to 400 feet of water. There, between February and June, a female crab will first molt, shedding her hard exoskeleton, and find a male to mate with, explains Kalvass.

She’ll hold the sperm and carry the eggs around — up to 2.5 million of them — before releasing the eggs and fertilizing them sometime between October and December. The little castaways float to the surface, where many of them become fish food. The survivors go through five larval stages, and by springtime will enter a sixth stage — called megalopa — in which they look like a crab with a tail and are about the size of a quarter.

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