Crab Team Welcomes Hannah Brown as Student Assistant

Hello everyone!

I am so excited to serve as the new Crab Team graduate student assistant. I am passionate about both crab and citizen science, so I feel like I am definitely in the right place here amongst all these crabby people. I just finished my first year of graduate school at the University of Washington in the School of Marine and Environmental Affairs and I am currently working on my thesis which uses Dungeness crab data from the Molt Search program. I am looking to model Dungeness crab size classes across space and time in Puget Sound. I was invited to present my ongoing research at the 2025 Molt Search Kick Off Webinar event, a recording of which can be found here: Molt Search Season Kickoff Webinar Recording 6/4. If you have any thoughts or questions about my research I would love to hear from you! My email is hkbrown7@uw.edu.

My Background

My first field work experience during my undergraduate years was with Sea Otter Savvy, a non-profit organization who uses participatory science to gather behavioral data on sea otters in central California. I got to see the data I gathered make real change through contributions to ongoing research about sea otter behavior, and met a great team of people. After I graduated from Cal Poly in San Luis Obispo, I worked on the California Department of Fish and Wildlife (CDFW) on their Marine Invertebrate Team. I worked in many different fisheries including brown box crab, Dungeness crab, red abalone, red and purple urchin, Pismo clam, sea cucumber, and ridgeback prawn. Most of my work was concentrated in the experimental brown box crab fishery, which is where I discovered my passion for crab. I went out on trips with commercial fishermen and tagged all the box crab that were too small or too soft to be sold. We could then track the crab across time and space to try to answer questions about their abundance and movement. These crab live about 600 feet down and it was fascinating to get to interact with them, something most people wouldn’t have the opportunity to do. After my time at CDFW, I pivoted a bit into freshwater work with the AmeriCorps Watershed Stewards Program (WSP). I learned just how interconnected freshwater and marine systems are and the management differences between the two systems. While I enjoyed my time at WSP, I ultimately realized that the marine world was where I wanted to end up in my career.

In 2022, I moved up to Washington and began working on the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife (WDFW) Puget Sound Shellfish Team as a scientific technician. I worked with recreational fishers in the Dungeness crab, red rock crab, pink shrimp, and market squid fisheries in Puget Sound. I would interview these fishers at the end of their fishing day to gather data on their catch and effort. I got to travel across the Sound and meet many different people. I learned how passionate Washingtonians are about Dungeness crab and how management differs between recreational and commercial fisheries as well as between different states.