How To Raise Delicious Cannibal Crabs

Do you enjoy eating crabs or other crustaceans? Crabs are a popular food in Jakarta. More restaurants have opened with names such as The Holy Crab or Cut the Crab. Crabs can be served with spicy sauces or grilled, fried, or steamed.

Crabs are a huge business in Indonesia and around the world. Crabs are popular in China and in the United States. These two countries consume the most crabs in the world as a whole.

In the last few years, Indonesia has exported more than half its crabs to the US. In 2011, Indonesia exported crabs to the US worth US$ 262 million, which was more than any other major exporter, including China, Vietnam, and the Philippines.

Crabs also like the taste of these decapods. Crabs also enjoy the taste of crabs’ flesh. They are cannibals.

We have to work harder to find ways to breed them because of their unfortunate tendency to eat one another.

Crabs will eat each other.

Crabs are notoriously hard to hatch and rear. As soon as their claws begin to grow, they start to hunt, even if the only prey available is their brothers and sisters. The stock of wild crabs has been depleted due to an over-reliance on them.

Indonesian officials recently issued a new regulation that limits the size of crabs caught and prohibits trapping females with eggs. To help reduce the size and number of wild crabs, it would be beneficial if farmers found more ways to rear and hatch crabs.

The Research Centre for Oceanography has been searching for cheap ways to cultivate mud crabs and blue swimmer crabs that could be adopted locally by people who make their living through fish farming.

Due to the difficulty in hatching and raising crabs, Indonesian fishers rarely breed them. They catch them wild using bottom gill pots and nets. In Indonesia, crab farming has mainly focused on fattening crabs: taking them from the wild to put them into brackish water tanks for feeding until they can be sold.

Since around 1400 CE, Indonesians have been practicing aquaculture. They began by trapping milkfish in coastal ponds. Aquaculture is still widely practiced in Indonesia, and often with methods that have not changed much over the years. Crab aquaculture, however, is a relatively new development.

Our focus, unlike aquaculture projects abroad, which often focus on large-scale capital-intensive industries that are highly automated, has been to keep costs as low as possible.

It is partly due to the limited funding for research, but it’s also to make sure that the quest for efficiency doesn’t displace the traditional fishermen but instead helps to improve their practices.

Crabs can no longer eat each other.

We’ve created a way to keep crabs from eating each other.

Water cups of all kinds were too low for crabs to climb out. It turns out, however, that taller cups of juice are the perfect height.

We also tried a number of feeding regimens to fatten crabs. We used a variety of commonly available fish and added fish oil, calcium, and other sources.

Crabs grew faster on the fish diet than they did on shrimp, which is their natural diet. Farmers will be able to use this information to increase the growth rate of crabs. It will also stop crabs from becoming dependent on a single diet. Farmers can vary the diet of crabs based on seasonal availability.

The two simple steps of using cheap juice glasses to house crabs individually and feeding them different diets allow fishermen to breed crabs by breeding eggs from female crabs.

When the crablets reach a certain size, they can then be placed in ponds to fatten. The blue swimmer crabs are best cultured in saltwater with herbivorous species of fish. They should be harvested after 150 days. Mud crabs take longer to raise, between six and eight months in brackish water.

Raising crabs using milk-fish

Crabs are not a large part of aquaculture because there is no reliable source for crablets. Many farmers in Indonesia focus on milk-fish Chanos chanos and tilapia Oreochromis species.

We’ve encouraged fishermen to try out crab aquaculture by pressing them to rear both milk fishes and crabs on ponds that previously only had milk fishes.

Mud crabs and milkfish are kept together in bottom-net cages measuring 10 meters by 10 meters instead of the traditional bamboo cages that are less durable. Farmers immediately pointed out the disadvantages of this arrangement.

It was more labor intensive than monoculture farming because the stock had to be fed daily with two types of feed, one for crabs and another for fish. The advantage is that two crops can both be harvested and raised simultaneously.

Farmers were unfamiliar with the concept of controlling crab density in order to prevent cannibalism. Some farmers were also surprised to learn new tricks to solve problems, like controlling salinity. This is a challenge because the salinity of ponds varies with the seasons, and crabs can be very sensitive to it.

By working with farmers to develop research projects, they can continue farming in the ponds of their communities as they have done for generations. They can also use the research results to become more productive and sustainable.

With this new technology, not only Indonesians but also people in other parts of the world will be able to enjoy delicious crab dishes for many decades.