An eight-legged mollusk with a big appetite has once again threatened to wreck Lee County’s commercial stone crab season.
Hordes of octopuses have invaded the area and are turning trapped stone crabs into piles of shell fragments.
“They’re real thick offshore; past 30 feet deep, we’re catching a lot of them,” commercial fisherman Shane Dooley said. “Some traps have two or three in them. They eat the crabs as soon as they get in, and they go from trap to trap.”
All of Island Crab Co. owner Jeff Haugland’s traps are in 40 to 55 feet of water.
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