You know the toxic red tide in south Florida is serious when Joe’s Stone Crabs, the world-famous seafood restaurant in Miami Beach, starts to run out of stone crabs. But the stone-crab crisis is indeed serious, and it’s decimating the stone-crab fishing industry.
“This is about the worst I’ve ever seen it,” Rick Collins, 69 and an Everglades City crabber for more than 50 years, told The New York Times. Until this year, he usually caught 400 pounds of stone crabs a day. One day recently he offloaded 73 pounds, and he doesn’t know how much longer he can stay in business. (Collins is pictured above.)
Eddie Barnhill, 43, a third-generation crabber near Fort Myers, says the red tide “basically killed the ocean floor.” The shortage of stone crabs forced him to sell his boat last summer; he now sells ice commercially. “I can’t survive in the fishing business,” he said. “I used to run 50 miles one way to go crabbing, and there ain’t crabs there now. There’s crabs 150 miles out, but you can’t do that in one day.” (Stone crab claws must be cooked dockside the same day they’re caught or they will spoil.)
In the past, scientists assumed that stone crabs could survive south Florida’s perennial toxic red tides. But the red tide with its toxic algae has lasted much longer this year. Scientists say that prolonged exposure to the toxic algae, which consumes oxygen at night, can kill sea life below. Stone crabs are smaller and less adept swimmers than blue crabs. They use their relatively large claws to scuttle along the ocean floor away from the red tide. They can survive for short periods of time without oxygen in the water, but this year the red tide has been too prolonged.
Because of the shortage of stone crabs, Joe’s has removed them as an entrée option. Now they’re just listed as an appetizer. Read more:
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/16/us/stone-crabs-florida-algae-red-tide.html
