if crab fishing is so dangerous (think Deadliest Catch) why aren’t there crab farms like we have with fish?
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In a farm setting lobsters and crab eat each other. To successfully farm them you would need to separate them, which is expensive.
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My partner fishes lobster in the Atlantic in the winter. He says that Deadliest Catch is a pretty accurate representation of life on the boat out to sea… most of the time. They take great liberties with amping up the perceived risk because it really is boring.
The type of boat used around here has basically no back railing. Just open to the ocean so the traps slide right off when setting them. Fancy boats have a back that can go up and down. It freaks the fuck out of me that it is just wide open to the ocean. Like have the tail gate down on the back of a truck. Safety is very important. Number one way someone goes overbaord is not watching their feet and where the rope is. Rope catches your foot, you fall down, and it just drags you off the back.
Less than one person a season falls off the boat this way.
Crabs are cannibalistic, and territorial. If we did have a crab farm it would pretty much have to be as big as the area we’re already fishing for them in.
Edit: Weird that one of my most voted comments is about crabs being dicks. I’m not a professional crabber, though my uncle was a crab fisherman for a few seasons.
Couple things, we could cage crabs, but we would need to find a way to let them feed, mate and burrow. Crabs also need vastly different environments as they grow from larvae to full grown crabs, they’re migratory, so it would be very expensive to have a large farm that provides their needs.
There are crab farms, for certain crabs, they don’t produce nearly enough to make fishing obsolete. King Crabs, Dungeness crabs and snow crabs aren’t so friendly.
Crabs are territorial assholes who will kill each other. The ones in the tanks at restaurants have their claws wrapped so they can’t kill each other, but they also can’t eat with their claws wrapped. There wouldn’t be a good way to feed crabs at scale on a crab farm like you could a fish.
Dunno about other countries but there are crab and lobster farms here in my country (Vietnam). And it is not rare either. Wild ones are considered better and more expensive, but the majority of crabs supply here comes from farm.
Not really mentioned is it takes a king crab five years to reach harvesting size. For farmed animals this is a pretty long time. For comparison beef cattle are slaughtered at about 18 months – 2 years.
There are many reasons why some animals and plants can’t be grown in a farm set up. Stress on the animal is the main one. Lots can’t handle captive life. Inter fighting is another one. Proper food supply can be an issue as well. Pretty much, at this point, it it can be farmed, it already is being farmed
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In a farm setting lobsters and crab eat each other. To successfully farm them you would need to separate them, which is expensive.
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