“From Mud to Table” ­— that’s the title of an Extended Learning Opportunity (ELO) project being conducted by two Brunswick High School Seniors. The muddy part involves the invasive green crab population that likes to munch on valuable soft shell clams. And the table part is figuring out ways to eat them. The many steps in between are not without their challenges, but there are some innovative solutions in the works. This is what Ariana Edwards and Chloe Kilborn are documenting through a series of photographs and interviews. Their goal is to present this encapsulation of the problem and possible solutions to the public in order to raise their awareness.

“After we took Mr. McCullough’s Marine Biology class, we were really interested and wanted to do more,” says Ariana. “We came up with this idea for an ELO and presented it to Mr. Wilson,” added Chloe. Rick Wilson is the Community Outreach & Extended Learning Opportunity Coordinator. He and Andrew have been working together for the past three years on an applied aquaculture project at the Wharton Point outdoor classroom. Their students have seeded the flats with clams and measured their growth and survival rates. One of the biggest threats to the clams is predation by green crabs, so they put nets over the nursery area as well as set out crab traps. The problem arose early on of what to do with the crabs after they’d been trapped. Some of them have been used for fertilizer and others frozen. But, Ariana and Chloe started investigating other options.

That’s when they came across Manomet’s work on green crabs. Manomet is a local non-profit that works on coastal resource issues in New England. Marissa McMahan, Senior Fisheries Scientist at Manomet, works on green crab population monitoring as well as options to develop a fishery for them. She laughed when she admitted to being known as “The Green Crab Queen”. “Because green crabs are invasive, there is no limit on how many you can take. That presents an opportunity for fishermen, but it isn’t a simple one,” she explained. Green crabs do not contain a great deal of meat per individual and processing them is very labor intensive.

A few years ago, Marissa connected with Georgetown native John Taggart who had met someone in the soft shell crab fishery in Venice, Italy. Fishermen there collect the crabs just before they molt and hold them until they have a fresh, soft shell. They are then sold to restaurants as moleche and are considered a delicacy. “I thought, there’s no reason we couldn’t do this in Maine,” says Taggart. Ariana and Chloe aimed to capture Jonathan and Marissa’s work on film while standing on a dock on the Back River in Georgetown. This is one of several study sites where Manomet has been taking weekly samples from May to November for the last three years to learn more about when crabs molt and how to identify and capture them just before they do. When they get it right, they are able to hold them in a nifty “crab condo” – a wire mesh cage that Jonathan designed with individual compartments that keep the otherwise cannibalistic crabs away from each other until they molt.

Then comes the table part. The Manomet project has connected with a couple of local chefs and restaurants so that when they do have a supply of freshly molted soft-shell crabs, they can get them onto people’s plates. Enoteca Athena in Brunswick and Salt Pine Social in Bath have both offered soft-shell green crabs on their menus. Ali Waks-Adams, a local Brunswick chef, has been creatively cooking green crabs as well. Ariana and Chloe learned a bit from her about both the challenges of cooking something with so little meat, but also about the exciting possibilities. “It’s a collaborative effort to all get together and eat them and do whatever we can do,” says Waks-Adams.” Right now, the scale of things is still quite small. “We get maybe 25 crabs to a restaurant at a time, so that’s 25 people who get to try it. Now we just need to figure out how to scale things up because the demand is there,” added Taggart.

Studying a creative solution to an environmental problem like this one is a perfect stepping-stone for Ariana and Chloe who don’t intend to end their marine science education after graduation. They will both be heading to the University of Maine at Orono in the fall – Ariana to study Biology and Chloe to study Ecology and Environmental Science. But, before they do, they will be sharing their findings with the public. Their project will be posted on the Brunswick Outdoor Classroom blog www.ilovemudflats.wordpress.com.