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Monday, March 18, 2024
March 18, 2024

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Florida’s stone crab season drying up following Hurricane Irma’s beating

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MIAMI — Less than halfway through Florida’s lucrative stone crab season, traps are drying up, dealing another blow to a fishing industry still recovering from a beating delivered by Hurricane Irma.

“Everybody’s feeling it,” said Walter Flores, owner of the Golden Rule Seafood in Palmetto Bay, which has been selling and serving stone crabs since 1943. Normally Flores starts taking orders for holiday crabs about now. But this year, he said, it’s first come, first serve.

“We have them,” he said, “but you have to offer more money to get them. It’s almost a bidding war.”

Medium claws that sold for about $19 a pound last year are now going for $26.99, he said. Large claws are pulling in $45 a pound.

Irma hit about a month before the season opened on Oct. 15, first crossing the Keys, where about 60 percent of the state’s stone crabs are caught, then making a second landfall on Marco Island in Collier County, the state’s second-biggest supplier responsible for about 20 percent of the catch.

Initially, crabbers were optimistic: Many had suffered damage to homes and boats but not traps. In Everglades City, the city held its annual blessing of the fleet followed by a busy day of emptying traps.

“It was probably the best start we got in 10 years,” said Everglades City Mayor Howie Grimm, owner of Grimm’s Stone Crab.

But by Thanksgiving, more traps started coming up empty, said Ryan Gandy, a research scientist with the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission who tracks crab landings and monitors eight locations around the state.

“We don’t really know why that is,” he said. “We know they move when the water gets churned up.”

The working theory is that as the massive storm churned up shallow waters where many crabs dwell, they made a move and scuttled offshore. Gandy said fishermen reported few landings inshore with most of their catches coming offshore.

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