When I first made the acquaintance of green crabs, it was in a Woods Hole science laboratory, where a researcher described them as “chaos monkeys.” But at the time, they seemed harmless enough in their little glass tanks.
Flash forward a year or so, and I’m in Vineyard Haven, at the screening of a new documentary.
The name of the film is One Bad Crab. It drives home in vivid detail the path of destruction these little crustaceans are carving through coastal ecosystems.
It was inspired by a magazine article written by Nelson Sigelman, who eventually became the film’s narrator.
“I'd never given much thought to the green crab,” Sigelman says in the film. “It was, I thought, just another crab. But the more I learned about this creature, I realized that it's like a college football team hitting an all-you-can-eat buffet.”
Green crabs claw open anything and devour other species in their path like it’s two-for- one night at the local raw bar.And they reproduce in a way that makes the word “exponential” sound like slow motion. The film shows a healthy female capable of carrying about 165,000 eggs each year.
“Multiply that by…all the females that are up and down the coast, and I mean, we're talking about well over trillions and trillions of eggs and small juvenile crabs,” the film explains.
Green crabs are so destructive, they’re giving shellfish producers second thoughts about whether and how to plant the next generation of young spawn in open water.
There is an upside. Just about every other species – including humans – find green crabs delicious. To prove the point, filmmaker Sandy Cannon-Brown prepared a crab hors d’oeuvre for the audience.
“These are all just little crackers with some kind of cheese, and crab, and old bay spice on top,” Cannon-Brown says.
Members of the crowd told me the appetizer is delicious and compares well to other crab canapes they’ve had.
“It would take a while to take apart and get all the meat, but there’s no reason you couldn’t make a good crab cake out of that,” one audience member says. “Just boil the heck out of them and pick them apart and get what you want. It depends how adventurous you are. You can get up in the body and get a lot of meat, but it’s a pain in the butt.”
That is one of the disadvantages of green crab cuisine: the labor-to-meat ratio.
Enter Mary Parks, the founder of GreenCrab.org.
“I would say stocks and broths are your easiest starting point, and that is the foundation for sauces, soups, chowders, bisques,” she says. “So many things that you can make with green crabs.”
Parks grew up in Maine and saw firsthand the damage green crabs were doing to the clamming business. But the market was treating crabs as a bait or trash fish, and she saw a potential gap that she could fill.
“What was missing was having that consistent supply chain and having a targeted effort so that chefs had the chance to learn about the culinary potential of the species,” Parks says.
Parks has built out GreenCrab.org into something of a Wikipedia of green crab knowledge, including a chef’s advisory network. But what does she do in her own kitchen?
“I am a huge fan of green crab roe and I've recently really been into making a whipped roe butter and serving that with some pickled vegetables and crackers or some crunchy bread,” she says. “Soft shells, though, have my heart.”
Ironically, Cannon-Brown, the filmmaker, doesn’t feast on green crabs that often. She’s from Maryland and is accustomed to blue crabs with more meat on them.
“I am a crab snob,” she explains. “Also, when we moved up here I found a delight in the cod, and the haddock, and the halibut, and other things that I had not had farther down south. So, my tastes are changing a bit.”
