FoundSF

Historical Essay

by David D. Schmidt, 2026

An excerpt from the book, San Francisco Bay Area: An Environmental History, by David D. Schmidt (Backcountry Press, 2025).

Crabs at Fisherman's Wharf, 1950s.

Photo: Walter H. Miller

Dungeness Crabs roam ocean and estuary waters from the Bay Area north to Alaska. They have been caught commercially as far back as 1870. At that time, most fishers regarded crabs as a nuisance, since they set out their nets for fish but sometimes caught crabs. A relic of their disdain remains in the rowing term “catching a crab,” which means hitting a wave with an oar, a clumsy mistake.

By 1882, San Franciscans had developed a taste for the crustaceans, and fishermen trapped nearly 2.9 million pounds using baited metal cages known as crab pots. In the 1880s and 1890s, more than a million pounds of crabs were taken annually. The record catch was 3.7 million pounds in 1899.

By the early 1900s, overharvesting in the bay resulted in scarcity. So crab fishermen began setting their traps in ocean waters. The state legislature, concerned for the future of crabbing, in 1895 banned the taking of female crabs, and in 1903 imposed a minimum size rule and a closed season. By 1916, the entire catch came from the ocean outside the Golden Gate. Annual catches from 1916 to 1926 averaged 1.4 million pounds.

Between 1916 and 1935, the local crabbing fleet comprised 200 to 250 boats, mostly docked at San Francisco's Fisherman's Wharf and Sausalito. The crabbers formed the Crab Fishermen’s Protective Association in 1913 to bargain collectively with fish dealers to set prices. To keep prices up, they also lobbied to prevent competition from crab fishermen in Humboldt Bay, where there were plenty of crabs but not enough people to buy them. The state legislature obliged the local crabbers by banning the sale of North Coast crabs in the Bay Area until 1941.

Fisherman's Wharf, c. 1950s, before touristification kicked in.

Photo: provenance unknown

In early 1942, following Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor, all "enemy aliens," including Italian immigrants, were prohibited from entering the waterfront district, including Fisherman’s Wharf. Many of these aliens were Italian North Beach residents like Luciano Sabella, age 71—fishermen who had been in the U.S. for decades and had families who were all U.S. citizens, including sons in the military. The ban on Italians on the waterfront was intended to prevent them from clandestinely meeting with enemy ships and submarines on the high seas (since Italy was allied with Germany and Japan). So many Italian fishermen were sidelined that the Bay Area's crab catch dropped by half.

Coast Guard motor lifeboat escorting San Francisco's crab fishermen during WWII.

Photo: Ann Rosener, Library of Congress

By November, 1942, however, after quiet lobbying by prominent Italian Americans, the Secretary of the Navy relented. Italian fishermen were again allowed to fish, as long as the captain of their boat, or at least 50% of the crew, were American citizens. Luciano could again go out crabbing with his sons, who as citizens were trusted to keep their boat away from enemy submarines.

The local crab catch grew by leaps and bounds after the war, reaching a record 6 million pounds in 1948, and an all-time high of more than 8.5 million pounds in 1957. Tourists and locals alike flocked to Fisherman’s Wharf to eat crab in restaurants or buy one from vendors cooking them in steaming metal pots outside.

Then came the bust. From the 1960s through the 1980s, the annual Bay Area crab catch rarely rose above 1 million pounds. Biologists blamed a climatic shift, in part, for the decline. Crabs flourish best in cold water, but El Niño weather conditions brought warmer waters. The local crab catch finally rose to about 3 million pounds in 1988 and fluctuated in that vicinity until 2014.

Higher water temperatures returned in 2015, bringing with them a brownish blob of phytoplankton, Pseudo-nitzschia australis, which produce highly toxic domoic acid (which killed hundreds of birds in Santa Cruz County in 1961). Any organism that eats the phytoplankton becomes contaminated, and the contamination moves up the food chain to crabs and people who eat them. For this reason, the usual mid-November start of crab season was delayed by months. It happened again in late 2016,(1) but crabbers still managed to increase their take to 5.3 million pounds.

At the same time, there was a jump in whale entanglements with fishing gear, including crab traps, from 11 in 2013 to 53 in 2015 and 55 in 2016. Since most of the entanglements involved humpback whales, listed as threatened under the federal Endangered Species Act, the nonprofit Center for Biological Diversity sued the state in 2017, for violating the law by allowing crabbing when humpbacks are likely to get entangled. This led to a legal settlement requiring greater protection for whales and sea turtles, including delaying or closing fishing seasons. The delayed season reduced entanglements by more than half in 2019, but also reduced the Bay Area crab catch to 1.9 million pounds.

Crab nets stacked on Pier 45 in 2013.

Photo: Chris Carlsson

The crabbers, meanwhile, worked to reduce whale and sea turtle entanglements by reducing excess ropes and surface buoys on crab pots, removing lost fishing gear that can entangle whales and turtles, and reporting whale sightings. In 2021, crab gear entangled only a single whale on the entire California Coast. The DFW opened the next crab season on December 29, 2021—time enough for humpbacks to migrate south to breeding grounds on the coast of Mexico and Central America, and just in time to put crab on the market for New Year’s Day, 2022.(2)

Questions? Email the author: davidnaturesf@gmail.com

Notes

1. Frank, James, “What happened to commercial crab season?” baynature.org, December 3, 2019.

2. Duggan, Tara, “Group petitions U.S. for switch to new crab gear,” San Francisco Chronicle, Dec. 13, 2021; Duggan, Tara, “Local Dungeness Crab in time for New Year’s,” San Francisco Chronicle, Dec. 17, 2021.

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Excerpted from David D. Schmidt's San Francisco Bay Area: An Environmental History. Available from Backcountry Press.