Crab and Nama Salad

As would be expected, the shallow coastal waters of the Pacific abound with edible marine crabs, some curiously shaped, others graphically marked with spectacular colors. The most common is Scylla serrata, the swimming crab with a serrated shell or carapace. It turns up in Papuan markets, purple-blue and tied with twine so it cannot attack shoppers. Introduced to Hawai’i in the 1920s, it is known there as the Samoan swimming crab. Hawai’i is also the home of the Kona crab, Ranina