As New England's coastal waters warm faster than almost anywhere else on Earth, the region's marine ecosystems are experiencing damaging changes, but locals are making the best of it.
One major shift is the surge in populations of the green crab, an invasive species that poses a serious threat to local fisheries, according to CBS News.
These crabs, native to Europe and northern Africa, have very few natural predators in U.S. waterways, but cold winter temperatures help keep their population in check. However, with milder winters, especially in areas like Duxbury Bay, Massachusetts, green crab populations have exploded.
Even more so, their appetite for clams, young lobsters, and other shellfish has been devastating to the region's clamming industry.
In response, some in the seafood industry are turning this overpopulation issue into an economic opportunity.
Local fisherman Jeff Ladd, for instance, is harvesting green crabs, catching up to 2,000 pounds per day during peak season.
"They're like cockroaches of the sea," Ladd told CBS News. "There's millions of green crabs here in the bay."
Sharon St. Ours from St. Ours & Company also saw the havoc the species was wreaking and wanted to find a way to make them useful. St. Ours & Company is a producer of seafood broths, and she saw an opportunity to put the crabs to delicious use.
"It definitely has a delicious flavor, and I hope people don't think of it as something that, you know, they'll try on a dare," St. Ours said, according to CBS.
The company has developed a seafood broth using green crabs, transforming 5,000 pounds of the crab into 1,000 gallons of broth sold to commercial kitchens in the last year.
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More tax incentives 🏦 St. Ours believes that with enough awareness and people willing to try the new broth, demand will begin to boom, and incentives to capture the invasive species will go up.
People along the coast have gotten creative with the green crab population. One Maine-based chef is cooking them into delicious sliders, while a distillery in New Hampshire uses the species in a crab-flavored whiskey.
These innovative approaches not only provide additional revenue streams, they help control the green crab population, offering a sustainable solution to an invasive problem.
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