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Paper short abstract

Mobile blue crabs, called 'invasive' and blamed for reshaping Italian lagoons, are here to stay. Through experiments in living together, from catching to cooking, fishers and cooks develop situated expertise that reworks coexistence, value, and belonging in changing ecologies.

Paper long abstract

With the arrival and proliferation of the blue crab, a famously voracious crustacean from the western Atlantic, the lagoonscapes of northeast Italy have been altered. The Manila clam monoculture which defined region is crumbling, while the artisanally fished smaller green crab is increasingly hard to find; blue crabs take the blame and are labeled ‘invasive’. Those who make a living in these lagoons say, despite their anger at the blue crab, dobbiamo convivere: we have to live together. This living together entails killing, selling, and letting-alone, but it also implies learning this new species intimately.

Based on ethnographic fieldwork in Italy, this paper examines how fishers’ and cooks’ experiments in catching and valuing the crab differently generate knowledge and authority about a hypermobile species that is not reducible to institutionalized science or dominant forms of capitalist production. For example, re-creating a typical Venetian dish, moeche, to use the blue crab instead of the traditional (native) green crab requires both inventing new modes of fishing and constructing a deep understanding of the blue crabs’ habits, physiology, and flesh. In the process, marginal actors make moral, political, and economic claims. There is often tension here: between mourning previous multispecies alliances and opening towards new ones, and between drawing on images of idealized socioecological pasts and constructing futures which risk reproducing the same vulnerable monocultural logics as before. I argue that the knowledges that arise from these experiments are neither innocent nor harmonious, but rework what it means to live together.