The Tasty Blue Crab May be Creeping North with Climate Change

The tasty blue crab, prized for its tender meat, may be impacted by climate change. Scientists are discovering this species as much as 80 miles north of its native range as temperatures warm.

The historic northern limit of this species of crab is usually Cape Cod in Massachusetts. They usually weren't found in the Gulf of Maine, due to the cold Canadian waters that can be found there. However, form 2012 to 2014, scientists discovered blue crabs as far north as Maine and Nova Scotia, Canada. The researchers believe that warmer ocean temperatures in 2012 and 2013, which were 1.3 degrees Celsius higher than the previous decade's average, may have caused this.

"Climate change is lowering the thermal barriers that kept species from moving toward the poles," said David Johnson, one of the researchers, in a news release. "Climate change presents a challenge not only for ecologists, but for fisheries managers as commercially important species shift their ranges in response to warming oceans."

That said, blue crabs in the Gulf of Maine isn't completely unheard of. Ephemeral populations of blue crabs have been documented previously in the 1950s, during warmer temperatures. Once these temperatures returned to average, though, the crabs disappeared.

"It's too early to determine if the current blue crab population in the Gulf of Maine is permanent or ephemeral," said Johnson. "However, models predict an increasing warming of the world's oceans and recent observations of blue crabs may be a crystal ball into the future ecology of the Gulf of Maine."

Other researchers have documented the northern movement of other commercially important species in the northeastern United States such as lobsters, hake and flounder. Yet this is the first time a commercially important species has been found in the Gulf of Maine. The findings could be huge for this fishery in the future as temperatures continue to rise.

The findings are published in the Journal of Crustacean Biology.

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