crab aquaculture

February 8th, 2008

     Like I said, the days of the Great Crab Drives are over.  Stanwood fell into a century of decline and its heydays were lost in the mists of time.  The great undersea Serengetti of Saratoga Straits gradually succumbed to overharvesting and illegal hunting until finally the entrepreneurs of the South End rurned to aquaculture for economic viability and the days of free range crabbing were doomed.
     For awhile we had the range wars.  Fence cutting was common and violence too.  The old South enders didn’t take kindly to seeing the tidelands sectioned by barb wire.  Devil wire, they called it and went out by moonlight to cut it open.  Might as well try to stop the Gated Communities of today for all the good it’d do.
     So finally the eelgrass pastures, once stretching from South Camano to Bristol Bay, were gridded and barbed and the old timers gave it up as a lost quixotic cause.  When I first arrived in these parts, the old growth nettle forests were gone and so were the wild crabs.  Oh, I know what they say: these farm raised crustaceans aren’t really all that different, but the old boys tell me the taste is mostly gone now.  They say they dye em red artificially before taking em to market.  They say they’re escaping and breeding with the last of the wild Dungeness so the wild ones will be lost forever.  They say antibiotics and the food they give me – chopped up crab mostly – might give rise to strange diseases.  There’s rumors of Mad Crab every month over at Tyee Store.  And I gotta ya, I’ve seen peculiar behavior there myself.
    But the world changes, that’s the truth, and there’s no going back.  Pretty soon we’ll get Chinese crab grown in the Yangszte, 10 legged crustaceans painted red with lead paint.  Cheap though.  Real cheap.  And another South End industry will bite the dust.  Or the sand.  And the legends of the crabs will be lost as surely as the nettle forests.  So eat up.  And don’t worry about that Mad Crab.  These crabs were government inspected.  So you know they’re safe…….

Entry Filed under: deer in the headlights (concert commentary)