Florida Stone Crab

The Florida stone crab, Menippe mercenaria, is a crab found in the western North Atlantic from Connecticut to Colombia, including Texas, the Gulf of Mexico, Belize, Mexico, Jamaica, Cuba, the Bahamas and the East Coast of the United States, as well as the salt marshes of South Carolina and Georgia. The closely related gulf stone crab, Menippe adina, can interbreed with it to form hybrids and is sometimes treated as a subspecies, the two lineages believed to have diverged roughly three million years ago; they are managed as a single species for commercial fishing. The species is widely caught for food.