Transporting crab to market
Oliver Tully, BIM Inshore Fisheries Development Co-ordinator
Up to 10% of crab consignments arrive dead to market due to aination of poor handling along the distribution chain and natural seasonal variability in overall condition at certain times of the year.
The economic impact of such high losses to producers is also not yet known, but it is likely to become increasingly critical with such “a high quantity-low value commodity as crab,” he explained.
Emphasising the need to solve the problems of getting crab to market not only alive but also in peak condition, Tully indicated that a key to the solution lay in the hands of the fisherman as soon as the crab landed on deck.
“It’s important to realise that a high proportion of the crab coming on board a fishing vessel is of no economic value because internally its meat and muscle condition can be very low depending on the time of year it is caught,” he explained.
And while conceding that many years handling crab had often taught fishermen to be quite adept at separating well-conditioned crab from poorly conditioned crab, Tully said nevertheless that this was only partly true.
“Fishermen are good at grading the extremes of good condition from poor condition, but there is a proportion of crab right in the middle which is very difficult to predict what the eventual economical yield might be,” he said.
He added that the search for an accurate condition index to assess crab condition was not unique to Ireland, nor was it associated only with the brown crab species.
Tully said that while the Americans had developed a system using acoustic probes to predict the likely levels of meat recovery from lobster claws, the Norwegians used light beams to penetrate the carcass as a way of assessing its likely internal condition.
In Ireland blood testing was the system currently favoured to make the same judgments, and although accurate at correlating blood protein and meat yield, it had its limitations – especially the fact that the system could not be used on board fishing vessels.
“We have been trying to develop an index of condition to be used at some stage along the distribution chain so as to indicate what the economic value might be. Ideally, this should occur on board fishing vessels so that crab can be discarded and given time to recover even before it is landed.”
Tully concluded that transportation of crab to market not only depended on condition and handling but also on the quality of the transportation water itself.
Factors which mattered were temperature, exposure to air, low oxygen levels in the surrounding water, and the level of ammonia.
If these could be controlled and maintained within certain parameters, the chances of crab arriving to market in optimum condition could be greatly improved.