New England fights invasive green crabs with eat them tactic

If you can’t beat them, eat them. That’s become a slogan of sorts for the New England seafood industry and some of the fishermen who supply them, as they try to eradicate – or at least control – the population of one of the world’s most invasive species: the green crab.These pesky creatures offer little meat but have a voracious appetite of their own, wreaking havoc on the shellfish industry and the ecosystem.“They’re omnivores, so they eat everything, including a lot of our really important species and commercial species, like soft-shell clam,” Adrienne Pappal, habitat and water quality program manager for the Massachusetts Office of Coastal Zone Management, told Fox News Digital.Green crabs have been in New England since the mid-to-late 1980s, making their way from Europe and West Africa via cargo ships. The crabs have broad environmental tolerances, Pappal said, so they can live anywhere from intertidal to subtidal areas, from 30 to 100 feet.“They have a lot of ways to survive, and that’s why they’ve been really successful,” said Pappal.“They are so widespread in the environment and can have a lot of different impacts.”Green crabs are hard on the shellfish industry in Massachusetts, according to Story Reed, deputy director of the Massachusetts Division of Marine Fisheries (DMF). “On the North Shore, there are five towns that have done eradication programs that have been mostly funded through the state to pay fishermen to go out and try to eradicate these things,” Reed told Fox News Digital. “We’ve recently heard from towns in the Cape Cod area who are also interested in eradication programs because they’re seeing impacts to their shellfish as well.”Fisherman Jamie Bassett, of Chatham, Massachusetts, said he’s seen that firsthand.“We have an issue with green crab,” he told Fox News Digital. “A gravid female – gravid meaning egg-bearing – can, I believe, disperse up to 180,000 eggs into the water.” Bass...