if crab fishing is so dangerous (think Deadliest Catch) why aren’t there crab farms like we have with fish?
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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
8th generation crab fishing here. Two reasons: space as they would eat each other and it takes to long to shed their shells to grow to get to a good size. When they shed their shell they come out like jelly but slightly bigger and they have to harden up again and that only tends to happen once a year maybe twice in colder water. In the late 90s my father caught a cock (male) brown crab that was one of the biggest caught in the channel. We named it Clarence and gave it to Plymouth aquarium where it sat in one of the tanks. It was over 20inches across the shell with claws the size of boxing gloves and they reckoned it was well over 30 years old. Be impossible to farm that.
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.
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.
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
8th generation crab fishing here. Two reasons: space as they would eat each other and it takes to long to shed their shells to grow to get to a good size. When they shed their shell they come out like jelly but slightly bigger and they have to harden up again and that only tends to happen once a year maybe twice in colder water. In the late 90s my father caught a cock (male) brown crab that was one of the biggest caught in the channel. We named it Clarence and gave it to Plymouth aquarium where it sat in one of the tanks. It was over 20inches across the shell with claws the size of boxing gloves and they reckoned it was well over 30 years old. Be impossible to farm that.
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
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