Maybe it’s because it was Mardi Gras this week that I was fondly remembering the experience of eating freshly cooked crawfish with my hands, sucking out their meat along with the spicy seasonings in which they were cooked that coated their shells and delightfully tossing their bodies right onto the ground at an outdoor restaurant. This was a completely novel experience as a 9-year-old visiting my sister who went to college in New Orleans. It was much later in my life while visiting colleges with that same sister that I had a similar experience eating my first lobster.

Eating lobster this way is a somewhat familiar experience to those who live in or visit Maine, particularly in the summertime. Other shellfish like oysters, mussels and clams offer a similar “eat with your hands and toss the shells into a bucket” kind of experience. But one type of Maine seafood that doesn’t always get treated this way is crab. Much of the crab that we eat in Maine is fairly small and takes a lot of work to pick for what often seems like a small amount of meat. That’s true of Maine’s common rock crab (Cancer irroratus) that we often see crawling along the shore and sometimes hiding under seaweed.

They live along the offshore ocean floor up to 2,000 feet deep, but in late summer, we find the crab washing up in the intertidal zone, and a large majority are female (199 in 200 crabs found were female). Lack of knowledge in this spatial movement is concerning as it isn’t fully understood just what the crabs’ habits are. As these crabs come ashore, they also link into the terrestrial environment, which gives even more incentive to uncover just why the summer migration to shore exists.

But further offshore, there are Maine crabs big enough to crack open their claws and eat them much like the perhaps more famous stone crabs that are popular in places like Florida — by cracking open their hard claws and dipping them in butter or cocktail sauce. These are the Jonah crabs (Cancer borealis) that boats further offshore in the Northwest Atlantic catch. They have harder shells that have characteristically black-tipped claws. Their range extends as far south as Florida, but they are much more common in colder waters like in Maine and up into Canada. Jonah crabs look pretty similar to stone crabs, but if you get a look at a live stone crab, you can see that one of its claws is bigger than the other. This is not true of Jonah crabs that have similar-sized claws. Stone crabs are also spiny, much like Florida lobsters, and Jonah crabs are not.

In the past, Jonah crabs have mostly been caught along with lobsters in offshore traps, but recently, fishermen have targeted them specifically, using modified traps specifically designed to catch crabs. Jonah crabs are found in waters up to 2,000 feet deep, so traps are sometimes set down the canyons that lead down off of the continental shelf.

Because of the increase in landings for Jonah crabs in recent years, there are now limits put in place by the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission, an interstate management body that deals with many species that roam across state lines. This includes restrictions on the size of crabs that can be kept as well as mandatory reporting of catch, rules on trap size and escape vents, and you also can’t keep females with eggs — many of the same regulations that exist in the lobster fishery. Also similar to the lobster fishery, there is a recreational fishery. However, the recreational crab fishery does not require a permit and allows a fisherman to keep up to 50 Jonah crabs per day.

If you have a chance to try Jonah crabs, it is a very different eating experience than having picked meat in the form of a crab cake or a dip. It isn’t exactly like eating crawfish, but it is still worthwhile and a good excuse to try another type of Maine seafood that you can get in the frosty part of the winter.

Susan Olcott is the director of operations at Maine Coast Fishermen’s Association.