The recent shutdown of Alaska’s red king crab fishery got me thinking about how often overlooked Maine crab is. This weekend, I made a crab dip for friends using local Maine crab and was reminded of how versatile and delicious it is. I often get stuck on making crab cakes, but crab makes a great dip, omelet addition or simple salad topping. It’s also one of those hardy seafood types that sticks around all year and that you can enjoy during the chilly winter months.
We have several species of crab in Maine, the most prevalent two types that we consume being Cancer irroratus, commonly known as rock or peekytoe crab, and Cancer borealis, or Jonah crab. Rock crabs are so named because they are often found close to shore among the rocks and tidepools. The peekytoe nickname apparently refers to the picking of the crab’s toes, or claws, and picked-toe then morphed into peeky-toe. If you’ve tried to pick crab meat, maybe you would say that it’s because the meat tends to hide among all the shell! Jonah crabs are a little bit bigger, live in deeper water and are easy to distinguish because of the black tips on their claws. They’re sometimes served as whole claws rather than picked meat, in order to show off their pretty coloration.
Stella Moreno, an intern at Brunswick-based Manomet in 2019, shows a green crab, right, compared to a native crab, left. Kathleen O’Brien / The Times Record file photo
Both species are often caught incidentally in lobster traps or more intentionally by lobster traps that have been modified to select for crabs rather than lobsters. In Maine, you can commercially harvest crabs with the same license you need to harvest lobsters — hence the overlap in the fisheries. There are size limits, much like in the lobster fishery, as well as a prohibition on keeping females with eggs — both measures that help to keep a big enough reproductive population to replenish the stock.
Rock and Jonah crabs aren’t the only crab species found in Maine, however. Further offshore where the continental shelf drops off to a thousand feet or more, you’ll find red crabs (Chaceon quinquedens). These are also sometimes caught in lobster traps by fishermen who fish far offshore, primarily in southern New England.
In addition to native crab species, Maine has become home to two colorful species of crabs that don’t belong here. Blue crabs (Callinectes sapidus) have been showing up in greater numbers in Maine waters, coming up from their more southerly range as our waters warm. And, of course, green crabs (Carcinus maenus), native to Europe, made their way to Maine in the 1800s and have, in the recent past, decimated the soft-shell clam population as well as wreaked havoc on the native eelgrass beds.
So, while I very much hope that Alaska’s king crab fishery returns next season, I am grateful for the delicious native crab species that we have here in Maine. I’m also grateful for the people who bring them up from the cold Maine December waters and to those who pick out the delicious morsels of meat from their well-armored bodies.
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