Interesting from an ecological perspective. I spent one winter working on crab fishing boats in Alaska and have since been interested in the intersection of economics and ecology.

I remember seeing a graph of all of the different crab species that have been overfished from the Bering sea and they basically follow the same pattern, which is a parabola that steeply rises, peaks and then falls. Snow crab, king crab, tanner crab, hair crab have all followed this pattern.

Initially, there’s no market for any given crab, so they aren’t heavily fished. But then thanks to marketing — or more likely a vacuum created by the absence of another crab species due to overfishing — over a few year period, a crab species will become popular.

As demand increases, it will be heavily fished, which creates the steep rise of the parabola. Inevitably, that species will be overfished, which causes the price to increase and the demand to drop. Those two things combine to form the sharp decrease of the parabola on the other side.

When this happens, it opens up a niche — both in the ecosystem and the market — for another type of crab to become popular.

Unfortunately, this constant cycle of overfishing will end with no crabs left at all.

You’re good at marketing, maybe you can market the invasive Asian Shore Crab to US restaurants and turn it all around:) (http://eattheinvaders.org/blue-plate-special-asian-shore-crab/)