Can Venice's Iconic Crab Dish Survive Climate Change?
For more than 300 years, Italians have fried soft-shell green crabs, called moeche. But the culinary tradition is under threat
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Can Venice’s Iconic Crab Dish Survive Climate Change?
For more than 300 years, Italians have fried soft-shell green crabs, called moeche. But the culinary tradition is under threat
Crabs not yet at the molting stage are thrown back into the Venice lagoon.
Simone Padovani/Awakening/Getty Images
Domenico Rossi, a fisherman from Torcello, an island near Venice, was 6 years old when he first went fishing with his dad. “I loved everything about it,” he says. “The long days out on the water, the variety of fish, even the rough winds that would sometimes capsize our boat.”
Rossi vividly remembers picking up nets full of eels, cuttlefish, prawns, crabs, gobies and soles. But that rich biodiversity is now a distant memory. In the past 30 years, the population of many species native to Venice’s lagoon, a fragile ecosystem of brackish waters and sandy inlets, has shrunk. “At least 80 percent of species have gone,” Rossi says.
Domenico Rossi is one of the last fishermen trained to catch local soft-shell crabs.
Vittoria Traverso
The 55-year-old fishermen is one of the last trained to catch local soft-shell crabs. Scientifically named Carcinus aestuarii, the green crab is the key ingredient of a beloved local dish called moeche (pronounced “moh-eh-keh”), a word that means “soft” in Venetian dialect. Dipped in eggs, dredged with flour and fried, these crabs are usually served with a splash of lemon and paired with a glass of local white wine. The origin of this dish goes back to at least the 18th century—it was mentioned in the 1792 volume on Adriatic fauna by Italian abbot and naturalist Giuseppe Olivi. As Olivi described, moeche are only found twice per year, during spring and fall, when changes in water temperatures trigger crabs to molt.
Until ten years ago, it was common to find fried moeche in osterias and bacari, or informal wine bars, across Venice’s lagoon, from Chioggia in the south to Burano in the north. Recently though, it has been increasingly hard to find them. Fishermen report a 50 percent decline in catch just in the past three years.
As climate change, pollution and invasive species put pressure on local species, fishermen, chefs and locals may need to rethink their centuries-old food traditions.
Dipped in eggs, dredged with flour and deep-fried, the crabs are often served with polenta and lemon.
Simone Padovani/Awakening/Getty Images
A fragile ecosystem
Spanning 212 square miles, from the River Sile in the north to the River Brenta in the south, Venice’s lagoon is the largest wetland in the Mediterranean. Only 8 percent of the lagoon is made up of islands, including Venice, while the remaining surface is a mosaic of salt marshes, seagrass wetlands, mudflats and eutrophic lakes. These diverse habitats, characterized by various degrees of salinity and acidity, have historically been home to a rich variety of species. But in the past three decades, the impact of pollution from nearby industries, erosion due to motorboat traffic and warming waters have put pressure on the lagoon’s fragile ecosystem. This period coincided with the installation of MOSE, a system of movable floodgates designed to temporarily seal the lagoon from the Adriatic Sea to protect inhabited areas from sea-level rise. While essential to Venice’s survival, MOSE now prevents high-tide waters from reaching the innermost parts of the lagoon, preventing the influx of oxygen and nutrients that come with seawater and halting the formation of sandbars and salt marshes. As a result of these changes, many habitats have degraded and some native species have been hard hit.
Spanning 212 square miles, from the River Sile in the north to the River Brenta in the south, Venice’s lagoon is the largest wetland in the Mediterranean.
Vittoria Traverso
The green crab is found in many parts of the Mediterranean, including Italy, France, Spain and Tunisia. But it is only in Venice’s lagoon, in places like Chioggia, Burano or Torcello, that fishermen have developed a special technique to capture this crustacean during its molting phase. Like all crustaceans, green crabs molt while growing. During molting, they shed their outer shell, leaving behind an edible internal soft-shell. Fishermen in Venice’s lagoon have learned how to identify and catch molting crabs.
“You need to learn to spot the signs on crabs’ shells to know if they are about to molt,” Rossi explains. “It takes years of just watching how your elders do it, and eventually you learn.” Crabs are typically caught 20 days before the start of the molting process.
Once caught, crabs are placed in cube-shaped nets along the shores of canals. Fishermen, or moecanti as they are called locally, check them up to twice a day to spot signs of impending molting. About two days before their shell-shedding process, they are placed in another container. “Once there, you have to check them more frequently to pick them up right when they shed their shell and they are soft,” Rossi says. As crabs get closer to molting, they become weaker, and they can fall prey to younger, stronger crabs. A key part of a moecanti’s job is to constantly check the catch to prevent this sort of cannibalism, Rossi explains. “You have to pick out the weak ones and separate them from the rest,” he says. “It takes decades just to be able to tell where crabs are in their maturation process.”
After molting, soft-shell crabs are usually sold and cooked within two days. When Rossi was a child, soft-shell crabs were abundant and considered part of Venice’s affordable rural foods known as cucina povera. But today’s scarcity has turned what was once an inexpensive fishermen’s food into a highly sought-after delicacy. Just six years ago, moeche sold for €60 per kilogram. The price of one kilogram of moeche can now reach €150, Rossi explains.
Once caught, soon-to-be-molting crabs are placed in cube-shaped nets along the shores of canals.
Vittoria Traverso
Green crab goes out, blue crab comes in
It’s hard to find accurate data on the green crab population of Venice’s lagoon. Scientists mostly rely on data from fishermen. “Based on fishermen’s catch, we can say that there has been an overall decrease of green crab in the past 50 years,” says Alberto Barausse, an ecologist at the University of Padua who has studied the impact of heatwaves on green crabs in the Venice lagoon using data from fishermen’s catch since 1945. Reasons for the decrease of green crabs are complex, Barausse explains. As detailed in his 2013 study, heatwaves can stress green crabs during their early embryo stage, making them less resilient to future threats. Changing rain patterns, with less constant rain but more frequent extreme precipitation, are changing the lagoon’s salinity levels, with a cascade of effects on its ecosystem. For example, higher salinity and warmer temperatures have incentivized the arrival of Mnemiopsis leidyi, a gelatinous marine invertebrate that eats mostly zooplankton, including the larvae of the green crab. Warmer waters have also contributed to the arrival of another highly invasive species, the blue crab.
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A native species of the Atlantic Ocean, the blue crab was first spotted in Venice’s lagoon around 1950. It is only in recent years that it found conditions suitable to fully expand its presence there. “Up until a few years back, water temperatures during winter were too cold for blue crabs,” says Fabio Pranovi, an ecologist at Ca’ Foscari University in Venice. “But thanks to warming waters, blue crabs now live and reproduce in the lagoon throughout the winter.”
Since 2023, the blue crab population in Venice lagoon has exploded. From an ecological standpoint, blue crabs are considered an invasive species, Pranovi explains, because they compete with native species like the green crab for shelter and food. They don’t yet have a significant predator, so they are growing at a much faster rate than native species. As explained by Filippo Piccardi, a postdoctoral student in marine biology at the University of Padua who wrote a thesis on the impact of the species in Venice’s lagoon, blue crabs are omnivorous predators who have found their ideal prey among many of the lagoon’s keystone species, such as clams and mussels. In 2024, the impact of blue crabs on local clams was so acute that local authorities declared a state of emergency.
For fishermen, these blue invaders are an enemy to battle with daily. “I can’t count the times I had to replace my nets in the past two years,” Rossi says. Traditional moeche fishermen like Rossi still make their fishing nets by hand. Each family has its own way of doing it, almost like a secret recipe, he explains. Because these handmade nets are used to catch green crabs, which measure around 4 inches across, they are close-knit with small holes. Blue crabs, which measure up to 9 inches, have much larger claws than green crabs, so they easily break net threads.
Blue crabs have much larger claws than green grabs so they easily break the threads of handmade nets.
Vittoria Traverso
“They are wickedly smart,” say Eros Grego, a moeche fisherman from Chioggia. “They come, break our nets and just wait there to feast on whatever was in the net.”
Damage from blue crab has been so significant that Rossi is considering replacing his nylon nets with iron cages. “It costs me about €20 to make a kilo of net,” he says. “If I have to replace them every season, it’s going to cost me a fortune.”
Blue crabs also eat green crabs, Pranovi says, and, according to Rossi, they have been feasting on their smaller local cousins with gusto thanks to their size and speed. “When you see them underwater, it’s just striking,” Rossi says. “Local crabs are so much smaller and can only move on the seabed, while these crabs are twice their size and can swim really fast across the water.” In 2025, Rossi has not caught any green crabs that would be suitable for moeche. “It’s the first year that I find zero moeche,” he says. “All I find in my nets is blue crabs and some date mussels.”
Grego, who works in the deeper southern lagoon, is having a similar experience. “We were already dealing with shrinking catch due to heatwaves and extreme rainfall,” he says, adding that changes in climate patterns had made the traditional molting season less predictable. The blue crab is the straw that broke the camel’s back.”
Changing traditions?
The arrival of blue crabs in Venice lagoon and the simultaneous decrease of the native green crabs are pushing some chefs to rethink traditional cuisine. Venissa, a one-Michelin-starred and green-Michelin-starred restaurant on the island of Mazzorbo, in the north of the lagoon near Torcello, has decided to no longer serve green crab. “Our philosophy is to cook dishes that don’t undermine the lagoon’s ecosystem,” says chef Francesco Brutto, who has been running Venissa with his partner, Chiara Pavan, since 2015. The couple embraced this style of low-impact cooking after noticing how Venice’s lagoon changed during the Covid-19 pandemic, when pressure from human activities like tourism was eased. “We spotted species we had not seen in years, like turtles and dolphins,” Brutto says. “So we decided to have as little impact as possible.”
Venissa has decided to no longer serve green crab.
Vittoria Traverso
For that reason, Venissa mostly serves plant protein, Brutto explains. Animal protein is used only from species that are not threatened. That means invasive species like veined rapa whelk and blue crab are now fixtures of Venissa’s menu. “Right now, eating green crab is the equivalent of eating an endangered dolphin,” Brutto explains. Venissa still offers moeche, the chef clarifies, but they make it with blue crab. “Moeche of blue crab taste better in my opinion. There is more pulp compared with green crab,” he says.
But not everyone is ready to give up traditional moeche. Ristorante Garibaldi, a traditional fish restaurant in Chioggia, has been serving moeche since it opened in the 1980s. “Our clients come here specifically to eat moeche,” says chef Nelson Nemedello. This year, Nemedello could only find about 800 grams of moeche from a local fisherman. “Prices are becoming insane. I paid them €170 per kilo,” he says. But demand is there, despite the price, so Nemedello and his wife keep serving green crabs. “It’s considered a food unique to this place, so people are willing to pay more for it.”
According to Fabio Parasecoli, author of Gastronativism: Food, Identity, Politics, sticking with traditional foods can be a way to cling to local identity during times of rapid and economic change. Traditional foods have always been intertwined with people’s sense of identity, he says, but in the past 20 years there has been a stronger identification with food in many parts of Italy, partly as a backlash against globalization. “It’s a little bit like saying this food is who we are,” he says. “If you take this away from us, then who are we?”
In the case of a place like Venice, tourists’ expectations of a specific type of local gastronomic identity also play a role. “If tourists come to Venice expecting to eat traditional food like moeche, then restaurants may feel like they have to offer that,” Parasecoli explains.
Plus, as Pranovi notes, it takes time for people to adjust to new flavors. “Some people find moeche made of blue crabs too big while others say the taste is not as subtle,” he says. “It is going to take time for people to change their expectations around how moeche should taste.”
Blue crab is now a fixture of Venissa’s menu.
Venissa
Changes in species distribution have always shaped food traditions. Parasecoli cites the example of potatoes, a species native to the Americas that became a widespread ingredient in European cuisine after its arrival from the New World in the 16th century. But in Venice, the pace of change feels fast to many locals. “I grew up in the lagoon, and it’s always been slightly changing. But in the past seven to eight years, I hardly can recognize it,” Rossi says. “It feels like being on the moon.”
This pace of change is leaving fishermen and local authorities to play catch-up. Since the blue crab invasion started in 2023, authorities have ordered the capturing and killing of blue crabs. But Piccardi, who studied the impact of the blue crab for his thesis, says trying to erase a fast-growing population that has found optimal environmental conditions is unrealistic. “Our advice is to focus on catching female crabs specifically in order to slow down reproduction,” he says. “And, ultimately, to learn to coexist with this new species.”
Fishermen like Rossi and Grego are adapting. “In the past three years, I have mostly caught blue crab,” Rossi explains. “I might as well shift the focus of my fishing.” While open to the idea of catching blue crab, Rossi doubts that this shift can guarantee a living. “There isn’t really a market for blue crab. They sell for less than €10 per kilo.” Tunisia, which is also dealing with massive uptakes in blue crabs, has developed a blue crab industry and established canning factories, Rossi notes. “If we did the same here, perhaps there would be some more opportunities.”
Future prospects
While fishermen are skeptical that their centuries-old livelihood can bounce back—Rossi nudged his son to find another career—scientists are careful to make any definitive predictions. “Things are still evolving,” Pranovi says. “When new species arrive, it takes time for ecosystems to adjust.” Green crabs may learn to cope with pressure from heatwaves thanks to oxygen released by salt marshes, Barausse says. But rising water temperatures, extreme weather events and the more frequent use of MOSE are all likely to destabilize local species, according to Pranovi.
With such dynamics at play, the only way for Venice’s iconic crab dish to survive may be to change its core ingredient. This may become a familiar tale in other parts of the world. “As climate change keeps undermining the habitats of traditional species, the tension between preserving tradition and adapting with new foods will become more and more common,” Parasecoli says.
Ironically, the very places where the blue crabs came from—such as the Atlantic coast of North America—now deal with an invasion of their own: European green crabs.
What’s the solution? Eat them.
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