Come fall, stone crabs take to hustling along the sandy bottoms, rocky outcrops, and seagrass beds along the Atlantic coast during their winter migration. And fishermen are hustling to catch them, especially in Florida, which provides nearly all of the nation’s haul of stone crab claws—a Southern delicacy that represents the most expensive domestic seafood in the country in dollars per pound. Though providers, restaurants, and crab claw enthusiasts were worried about how hurricanes Helene and Milton might affect the opening of the season on October 15, it’s still moving forward as best it can.
“The storm delayed throwing out the traps prior to the season starting,” says Roger Duarte, the CEO of Florida-based George Stone Crab, the largest vertical stone crab operation in the country. In a typical year, commercial players in the stone crab fishery are allowed to start catching crabs ten days before the season’s opening date. But many fishermen were hesitant to put out their thousands of traps, each of which costs about $50 to build, not including the tag each requires to operate—ahead of Hurricane Milton, which made landfall near Siesta Key, Florida, on October 9.
However, as soon as Milton moved out, Duarte’s fisherman went to work. “Usually we leave a trap out for thirteen days,” he says. “It’s like if a rocketship landed on Earth; the crabs get scared. But after a few days they smell the bait and get curious.” Duarte plans to wait ten days before pulling up the delayed traps, meaning those claws will be ready to ship around the 20th, and the resulting slow start to the season will hopefully right itself quickly, though the claws may be slightly more expensive than last year’s.
Across Florida, stone crab claws have a loyal following, in large part thanks to Joe’s Stone Crab, which started selling the claws back in 1921. “People are raving fans of stone crab claws; they go crazy for them,” Duarte says. That passion was one of the things that inspired him to start his own business sixteen years ago.
“This is a highly sustainable source of seafood because we only eat part of the body,” he adds. Each time a crab molts—once a year for adults and more often for juveniles—it is able to regrow its lost appendage, much like a lizard regrows its tail. The fishery is carefully managed by the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission, which sets the season’s dates and size requirements and asks that fishermen remove the claw properly, without damaging the muscle tissue, so the crustacean has the best chance of survival and regeneration of a new claw.
Today, George Stone Crab delivers claws in Florida and ships them across the country in sizes ranging from medium to mega colossal, accompanied with a tangy sauce made from mustard, Worcestershire, and a little heavy whipping cream. During peak season from November to January, Duarte might ship out up to 2,000 packages of fresh stone crab claws a day, all caught thirty-six hours before or less, then boiled for eight minutes. “They’re creamy, buttery. I’d take them over lobster any day of the week,” he says. “We’re all excited that the season is here.”