Modeling the impacts of the European green crab on commercial shellfisheries

Coastal resource managers are often tasked with managing coastal ecosystems that are stressed by overexploitation, climate change, contaminants, and habitat loss, as well as biological invasions. Therefore, managers increasingly need better economic data to help them prioritize their management strategies and distribute their increasingly limited resources to those strategies. Despite frequent pronouncements about the substantial ecological and economic impacts of invasive species, there have been few if any rigorous analyses of the economic impacts of invasive species in coastal systems. Here we present a bioeconomic analysis of the impacts of the European green crab, Carcinus maenas, on commercial shellfisheries along the West Coast of the United States. Green crabs are among the most comprehensively studied and widely distributed invasive species in coastal systems, with established populations on every continent except Antarctica. Their impacts on commercial bivalve fisheries have been alleged or substantiated to varying degrees, but no formal analysis of the economic impacts of the green crab has been conducted. We assess economic impacts using a combination of ecological and economic models. The ecological models incorporate green crab dispersal and description of estuarine habitat and the relationship between green crab abundance and predation on prey populations. The economic analysis focuses on the green crab impacts on commercial shellfisheries, including both historical and present impacts of green crabs on several important shellfisheries, including soft-shell clams, blue mussels, scallops, hard-shell clams, and Manila clams. We conclude that the past and present economic impacts on the West Coast shellfisheries are minor, although losses could increase significantly if densities increase or with northward range expansion into Alaska.