Every fall, as blackfish season nears, anglers across Long Island start gearing up—rods rigged heavy, sinkers sorted, and buckets ready to be filled with the one bait tog can’t resist: crabs. But this year, one subject causes more confusion, frustration, and head scratching than any other—the crab regulations.
Ask three different anglers about crab rules, and you’ll get three different answers. Some will tell you there’s no limit. Others will insist you can’t fish them alive. Still others will swear that if you move a crab from one spot to another, you’re breaking the law. The truth, as written, is a tangle of restrictions that seem at odds with the ecological reality we’re facing.
Here’s what the regulations actually say. Recreational harvest is capped at 50 crabs per person, per day, regardless of species. Mole crabs can be taken year-round with no size limit, hermit crabs have no restrictions, and green and Asian shore crabs can also be harvested all year without size limits. Note that anglers may purchase and possess any number of live or dead Green Crabs from harvesters and/or dealers who hold the Food Fish and Crustacea (FF&C) Dealers and Shippers License. Keeping a proof of purchase is encouraged. Bait shops are required to purchase Green Crabs from harvesters or dealers who hold a FF&C license. Bait shops are required to hold a commercial crab permit if they are harvesting Green Crabs for retail. Most is simple enough—until you look at the fine print.
Green crabs, long considered an invasive menace in our waters, must be dead before being used as bait. You can purchase them live from a licensed dealer, but the moment you cut or crack them for the hook, they need to be dispatched. Asian shore crabs, another invasive species found crawling over nearly every jetty rock at low tide, come with an even stranger caveat: they can’t be sold, transported, or possessed beyond the place you pick them up. Like green crabs, they also must be dead before you fish them.
Here’s where the frustration creeps in. Both green crabs and Asian shore crabs are non-native species that wreak havoc on our ecosystems. They outcompete native crabs, destroy shellfish beds, and alter the balance of our rocky shorelines. If the goal is to keep these invaders in check, wouldn’t encouraging anglers to remove as many as possible be a good thing? Instead, we’re capped at 50 a day and told that Asian crabs can’t even leave the shoreline they’re caught from.
Think about that for a moment. On any given tide, thousands of Asian shore crabs are crawling under the boulders of a South Shore jetty. Anglers willing to pick them could help reduce their numbers and put them to good use as tautog bait. Yet, by rule, you can’t take them home, you can’t sell them to a shop, and you can’t even carry a bucketful to another inlet. They can only be fished at the exact location where they were collected. Meanwhile, the crabs themselves continue to thrive and spread unchecked.
The green crab situation is equally puzzling. They’re so abundant that some scientists argue eradication is impossible, and yet, instead of loosening restrictions to let anglers take advantage of an unlimited supply of bait, the law keeps the harvest capped and the usage regulated. Why not let us be part of the solution by harvesting more of what clearly doesn’t belong here?
Of course, I understand the reasoning behind the rules. Regulators worry that transporting invasive species might accelerate their spread, and on paper, that’s a fair concern. They also want to prevent commercial-scale harvests without oversight. But in practice, these crabs are already everywhere. From Maine to New Jersey, you’d be hard-pressed to turn over a rock without finding a green or Asian shore crab. Their spread isn’t theoretical—it’s already happened.
Meanwhile, the anglers who are most directly engaged with these species—the ones catching, handling, and potentially removing them—are limited in ways that don’t align with ecological logic. Shouldn’t the regulations adapt to the reality that these crabs are here to stay, and that every one we pull from the rocks is one less competing with native species?
What adds fuel to the fire is the sheer confusion the current language creates. The average angler doesn’t carry a legal handbook in his tackle bag. He just wants to fish within the rules. But when those rules seem contradictory—telling you invasive crabs must be dead to use, can’t be moved, and can’t be kept in numbers greater than 50—the message gets muddied. Confusion leads to mistakes, mistakes lead to fines, and suddenly, the very community that could help manage these invasives is left feeling punished instead of empowered.
As we move deeper into blackfish season, anglers should do their best to follow the rules as written: keep no more than 50 crabs per day if harvesting yourself, dispatch green and Asian shore crabs before use, and if you collect Asian crabs, use them at the spot you found them. That’s the law, and until it changes, compliance is the only safe path.
But it’s also fair to question whether the rules themselves are outdated. Regulations should be written with ecological benefit in mind. In this case, loosening limits on invasives, or even creating programs to encourage their removal, could benefit both the environment and the fishery. At the very least, the state owes the recreational community clearer guidance, so that we can fish in good faith without second-guessing every crab in the bucket.
