Like many estuarine ecosystems in coastal Maine, the Ogunquit river has been inundated by green crabs. These invasives not only prey upon and outcompete native species in New England rivers, they’ve also led to the degradation of salt marsh beds which provide important habitat and ecosystem functions for the watershed including storm buffering, drainage, and CO2 sequestration.
The project not only tracked the number of green crabs by site, but also investigated the size, sex, shell stage, and, egg-bearing status of each crab collected. HeRO found that the proportion of female crabs varied by site, information that might be helpful for harvesters looking to collect roe-bearing females during ROE season. The team also stressed that citizen science data collection was key for locating soft-shell crabs and egg-bearing females that might be underrepresented by traditional box-trap data collection methods.
