MIAMI-DADE COUNTY, Fla. – South Floridians like their spiny crustaceans and cracked claws as a delicacy over the holidays.
At the famed Joe’s Stone Crab in Miami Beach, it takes more than a finely-dressed server to get the seafood on a customer’s plate.
“There’s so much in getting a stone crab,” said fourth generation owner Stephen Sawitz. “It’s an enormous proposition; it’s not fast food, I can tell you that.”
Joe’s sources much of its crab claws from the Florida Keys, where rising mercury over the summer had scientists scrambling. Water temperatures in the Keys were at record highs, wreaking havoc on the coral reef and raising questions about the marine life that depends on it.
Scott Dekle, owner of Keys Fisheries in Marathon, which supplies to Joe’s, said he was watching closely.
“I thought - this can’t be good,” Dekle said. “I started asking questions of a lot of the fishermen who had been here for years and years - and also to the biologists - and anyone I could speak with. I was trying to ask anybody: have we seen this before? They said no.”
Fishermen along the Florida Keys told Local 10 the relatively good start to the earlier lobster season was a positive sign, even though they have different migration patterns and behaviors than stone crab.
Jerome Young, Executive Director of the Florida Keys Commercial Fishing Association, said the initial crab production in nearshore water was below average, although it is too early to attribute that to warmer water.
“Crab season just started and some of our best months are ahead of us,” he said.
Sawitz said many factors affect the quality of a stone crab, like moon phases, water temperature and quality. And they’re all issues he worries about every year.
“We’ve been in business 111 years,” Sawitz said. “We’ve been through wars, we’ve been through recessions, we’ve been through riots. We’ve been though the best of times and worst of times.”