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.”
