For the second time in three years, a Gloucester fisherman has caught and landed an adult male Dungeness crab (Cancer magister) off Cape Ann.
Could this commercially important West Coast crab be the Northeast coast's new invasive animal? And how did it get here in the first place?
The online literature states the "Dungeness crab, named after a small town and the shallow bay inside of Dungeness Spit on the Olympic Peninsula in the state of Washington, is the culinary jewel of Netarts Bay, a prime destination for crabbers. Crabbing is good in many places in Netarts Bay, not only in the deeper channels, but even in the eel grass beds where they like to hide." Only male crabs with a carapace, or back, width of at least 51âÑ2 inches can be landed.
"I've had three blue lobsters, but never a Dungeness crab," said 54-year-old Ron Hemeon, a Cape Ann lobsterman of 43 years who works his Gloucester-based, 42-foot Alexis Margaret with stern man Sergio Garcia. The two trapped their 1.95-pound crab on the sandy bottom 120 feet down about a mile south of Magnolia on Aug. 21.
Hemeon first noticed the crab as he hauled aboard one of his 4-foot wire traps, and the crab lay flat on the bottom of the mid-parlor section.
"I thought someone had hauled this trap and put a fake crab in it as a practical joke," he said. "It was just sitting there motionless. I next picked the crab up, and it started moving. I then realized this was some kind of bizarre crab that I had never seen before," he said.
"My next reaction was the crab's presence is the result of global warming. The ocean water is very warm this summer, and things are changing because of that, and the crab is one of the new creatures here," Hemeon said.
At day's end, Hemeon off-loaded the crab at his lobster dealer, Steve Connolly Seafood Inc., where it was placed in a fish tank there.
Back on July 19, 2006, Gloucester gillnet fisherman Lou Williams exclaimed, "Wow! What the hell is that?" when he first hauled up his Dungeness crab snagged in a net set 270 feet down about two miles southeast of Thacher's Island. Williams was gillnetting aboard his approximately 45-foot Orin C. that day. He also owns the approximately 46-foot Pretty Girl.
The crab "... looked like a gigantic sand crab. I knew immediately it was a West Coast crab by the size of it. This one had been around here for a while because it had a little shell rot (or disease) on it," Williams added. He figured his crab also weighed around 2 pounds. Williams also believes the chlorine-treated effluents, especially those of the Massachusetts Bay outfall, are a cause of the shell disease that regularly afflicts lobsters.
Williams landed his Dungeness crab at Capt. Joe & Sons in East Gloucester. MIT Sea Grant personnel first positively identified the arthropod here before it later became a resident in one of the Gloucester Marine Heritage Center's aquariums.
Images of Hemeon's crab were e-mailed to Dr. Rafael Lemaitre, research zoologist and curator of crustacea at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Natural History.
From those pictures, "I feel reasonably confident that, indeed, it is a Dungeness crab," said Lemaitre.
"Maybe they (the Dungeness crabs) are being brought alive to the East Coast, and for some unknown reason, some may be released into the wild," surmised Lemaitre. People sometimes buy live lobsters, especially big ones, and return them to the ocean.
"Another and perhaps more likely scenario (of how the crabs arrived here) is through larvae in ship ballast water taken on the West Coast, then released here on the East Coast," Lemaitre explained. "Ballast water is a well-known means of introductions of non-native species around the world."
He added, "It would be of scientific interest to deposit this specimen in the Smithsonian collections ...."
Hemeon likes that idea, too.
Lemaitre has been in contact with him and Connolly's about getting the crab transported to Washington, D.C., but until that happens, this Dungeness crab remains in the fish tank at Connolly's Fish Market.
Incidentally, this same tank housed an extremely rare lobster with three anatomically complete and functional claws about four years ago. That lobster was trucked to Connolly's from Canada mixed in with a crate-run of lobsters. News of this oddity in both print and air media brought hordes of spectators to the fish market for a glimpse of the creature.
Gloucester lobsterman Peter K. Prybot writes weekly for the Times about the fishing industry and related issues.
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