Octopuses take toll
on Southwest
Florida stone crabs
Written by
KEVIN LOLLAR
klollar@news-press.com
10:55 PM, Mar. 18, 2011|
Trap after trap after trap: No stone crabs
or undersize stone crabs or barely legal
stone crabs, and very few of those.
All in all, an unproductive day off North
Captiva for commercial fisherman Shane
Dooley of Pine Island and an unproductive
stone crab season for all of Lee County's
fishermen.
Making life difficult for local crabbers is a
marauding horde of octopuses that are
climbing into traps and eating the highly
prized crustacean.
"They go from trap to trap to trap," said
Dooley, who has 1,026 traps in the Gulf of
Mexico and Pine Island Sound. "It's funny:
They know where the crabs are."
Stone crab claws are among the state's
most important seafood products: Over the
past 10 years, Florida's commercial
fishermen landed an average of 2.8 million
pounds of claws with a dockside value of
$22.86 million.
Crabbing was good at the beginning of the
season, which runs Oct. 15 to May 15.
"But then we had this run of octopus,"
Dooley said. "They ate a lot of our crabs or
chased them to the beach or offshore or
down south.
"In a good year, you can get a couple
hundred pounds of claws a day. Now you
get 15 or 20 pounds. With the price of bait
and fuel, you don't make any money."
Few crabs in traps means few crabs on the
market.
"We're not getting a whole lot of crab in,"
said Robert Busscher, manager of Island
Crab Company on Pine Island. "They're just
not catching as many. But we're getting a
lot of demand."
Stone crab claw prices at Island Crab are
$10 for medium, $15 for large and $19
for jumbo.
Pinchers Crab Shack, which has seven
restaurants in Southwest Florida, is having
trouble meeting demand for stone crab
claws, too, director of operations Grant
Phelan said.
"The supply is super tight," he said. "Lots
of boats (are) trying to fish, but there's not m
uch out there. It's tight all over Florida."
Stone crab dinners at Pinchers are $24.99,
$29.99 and $34.99.
While Lee County's stone crab season is a
bust, crabbers in Monroe County, the state'
s leading stone crab producer, are doing
fine, said Bill Kelly, executive director of the
Florida Keys Commercial Fishermen's
Association.
"We're having a very good year," he said.
"We don't have an octopus issue here.
Things are tapering off because of the
nature of the crab: They're moving off rock
to soft bottom, but early on, the harvest
was quite good. Prices have been good.
Demand has been good."
Of course, the big questions is why octopus
populations explode some years and not
others.
"I've spent a lot of years studying squid
and octopus, and there's no rhyme or r
eason to it," said Ron Toll, FGCU provost.
"But to see oscillations through time of
population numbers is not unusual. You see
it in lots of different organisms.
"Octopus can have years of large
recruitment followed by years of lower
recruitment. Some years they might be fed
on more heavily by predators than others."
Another possible reason for an octopus
explosion is the animals have simply found
an easy food source in trapped stone
crabs.
"If you are a wanderer-gatherer, and
suddenly you come to a place where there'
s highly prized food, what's your incentive
to move to another area?" Toll asked.
"Octopus are very intelligent. They do
learn. If they find a trap full of stone crabs,
they say, `Man, oh, man, what a great
meal.' So they seek out other traps. We've
opened a seasonal Publix for them."
Some fishermen have pulled their traps out
of the water, but a few, including Dooley,
are still trying.
"I'm going to gamble, let my traps soak
until the bitter end," he said. "They don't
catch crabs on the land."
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