Chinese Mitten CrabBiologists have been waiting for it, and now the other shoe–or rather claw–has dropped. for the first time female Chinese mitten
crabs have turned up in the Chesapeake Bay and they are reproducing. Inside the invasion lab at the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center in Edgewater, Anne Arundel County, the latest alien to invade the bay is being kept on ice. Caught in the
crab pots of waterman, eight male Chinese mitten
crabs have been found in Delaware in the last two years. Now, two females have turned up, loaded with eggs. “So they have mated and they have produced eggs, and now the question is are the eggs surviving? Is this a self-sustaining population?” said Carin Ferrante, Smithsonian researcher. Could it explode as it did in the San Francisco Bay, with mitten
crabs spreading all the way to Sacramento? The mitten
crabs may have arrived here as larvae in the ballast waters of ships. They spend most of their lives in freshwater and move to salty water to lay their eggs.