My curiosity about European green crabs began after witnessing their near indestructibility beside my own home. Our family fishes commercially in New England, where we grow or catch a substantial portion of our food. About 15 years ago, my children and I began capturing bushels of European green crabs for use as fertilizer. The process was simple. We harvested crabs in baited wire-mesh traps in an estuary in southern Rhode Island. Every so often we’d transfer bushels into coolers of tap water, where we expected they would die, as lobsters quickly do when immersed in fresh water. We’d then dump their limp carcasses into compost piles and cover them under a foot of decomposing leaves, vegetable scraps and manure.