A Familiar Monster Just Washed Up on the West Coast — and It’s Wearing Mittens

Panic is unfurling in the Northwest this week after a Chinese mitten crab was found close to the southern border of Washington state. The crustaceans are known for their white claws, patches of brown fur, long legs and stupidly cute name that makes them sound not scary at all.

“While this is a rare event in Oregon,” the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife said in a recent press release, “mitten crabs caused significant infrastructure and ecological damage in and around San Francisco Bay when the population was at its height in the late 1990s.”

And here we were, hoping this would be the one ’90s trend not to make a comeback.

Indeed, it was the Bay Area that turned these pinchy lil’ so-and-sos into full-blown phobia-bait when they were first spotted by shrimp trawlers in 1992. At that time, the Bay was the only place they’d ever been spotted in the United States — at least, out in the wild, with their snazzy little gloves on. Though their numbers increased slowly at first, by the late 1990s many people began acting like the crabs would be the death of us all.

One article in a 1998 issue of the San Francisco Examiner likened the mitten crabs to “a large glabrous tarantula, but with hairy claws and long spiny legs” which together were “turning thousands of miles of California waterways into a horror show.”

So why such worry about Chinese mitten crabs?

Well, for one, they are known to carry a parasitic worm called a lung fluke, which is able to penetrate human organs and cause symptoms that resemble tuberculosis.

“You can get the vicious parasite from eating the crab or handling it,” explained Cal Academy marine biologist Dusty “Best Name Ever” Chivers in 1998.

The other problem: Chinese mitten crabs live in freshwater, spawn in saltwater and are prolific diggers — and not in the cool 1960s theater troupe kind of way. Which means they like to travel and can wreck everything in their path, including flood-controlling levees and riverbanks. They’ve also been known to disrupt fish migrations, mess with the natural food chain and destroy commercial fishing nets willy-nilly, like the octopedal anarchists that they are.

In an effort to keep the homeland (and our estuaries) safe, Chinese mitten crabs have been banned from U.S. fish markets since 1986. Hailing from East Asia, they keep showing up on the West Coast likely due to shipping activities and/or smugglers filling a very niche demand. (The Examiner reported in 1998 that, for some, the crab’s “ovaries are believed to provide magical powers after being consumed.”)

By the time the millennium rolled around, Bay Area and Central Valley officials were engaged in an all-out effort to control the Chinese mitten crab population.

By far the most surreal method was to stop the crabs in their tracks via a contraption nicknamed “Crabzilla.” The 18-foot-high rotating screen was so effective, it successfully restored the Bay’s waters to natural order. The captured crabs, approximately one million of them, were then ground up and turned into literal fertilizer. (Spongebob Squarepants this is not.)

According to the U.S. Geological Survey, Chinese mitten crabs have been a rarity in the Bay since 2012. May a new Crabzilla keep their mittens from our shores.