if crab fishing is so dangerous (think Deadliest Catch) why aren’t there crab farms like we have with fish?
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Interestingly, lobstering is more like farming. Most lobsters will live entirely off bait and be caught hundreds of times and released before they are considered keepers. One study estimated that bait made up for 80% of what wild lobsters eat.
Some crabs are already farmed, notably mud crabs in south asia and hairy crabs in China.
Deep sea crabs aren’t farmed simply because it’s not economically viable. Depending on the species they might take 10 years to reach market size and live hundreds of metres deep, whereas mud crabs can be sold in less than a year.
Also some species are prone to attack each other.
I heard that when Europeans first came to North America, lobster were so plentiful that the lobster would wash up onto the beach in piles up to 2 ft high. But since lobster was considered the cockroach of the sea, it was relatively unpopular to eat.
https://www.history.com/.amp/news/a-taste-of-lobster-history
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.
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.
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.
They are cannibalistic and territorial as previously commented. Crab farming exists differently vs fishes, they are held in individual ‘hotel boxes’ in a RAS setup (closed loop recirculating water).
https://www.ras-aquaculture.com/free-mud-crab-farming-ebook?gclid=Cj0KCQiA3eGfBhCeARIsACpJNU9SJRJMEpyTNfsVQ1LqmVtn-DnaG2gIqfjMFCpcwOvijQDqYmovl8caAv-FEALw_wcB
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.
Some animals will only “love each other very much” under very specific conditions. Sometimes those conditions are either impossible or very, very expensive to recreate in captivity. Or we just haven’t quite worked out what the conditions are yet. Sometimes it’s cheaper or easier for our corporate overlords to just let workers die instead.
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.
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