Dungeness crab

The dungeness crab is perhaps best known as a common edible delight. It is a decapod, meaning it has ten legs. The dungeness crab has four legs on both sides plus two huge claws on the front, which they use for fighting and for self defense.

Anatomy
When the Dungeness crab is found alive the colour of both sexes is a blend of brown and tan. The Dungeness can be distinguished from the red rock crab with its slender, light-coloured claw tips.

Reproduction
The male crab will clasp the female crab so that their undersides touch or come in close contact. the actual mating will occurs a few hours after the female has molted her shell, because that is the only time that the females carapace is soft enough to allow the male to penetrate and deposit his sperm. The mating lasts less than 30 minutes. The male crab will follow his partner around, before and after she moults to make sure that she doesn't mate with any other male crab. The eggs are fertilized only when they are extruded after a number of months of moulting an mating, mainly in the fall.

Ecology
The dungeness crab lives in bays, and inlets. but they are found mainly under a rock and or in the sand or mud. The crabs have little hairs located around the water intakes, that keep their gill chambers from getting clogged with sand or mud.

Cooking Crab
When you cook a crab you need to boil it for about 20 minutes. One thing you shouldn't do is eat the internal organs including the "crab butter", because paralytic shellfish poisoning is found in those. The boiling helps kill those toxins plus it also kills the crab. Once you have finished boiling the crab, you should let it cool then you want to pull the crab shell off the crab. You do this by grabbing the back of the shell and pull up. Inside the crab is all of the guts. You will need to rinse out all the guts and then spilt down the middle of the crabs body.