October 28, 2026 — At 7:30 on a clear morning in December 2025, I arrived at the marina in Oxnard, California, in search of Mikey Volaski, one of the only commercial fishers in North America whose operation is dedicated to brown box crab.
His crew met me at the marina gate and escorted me to Volaski’s boat, the Coastal Reign—a pearly New England-style fishing vessel with a V-shaped hull for cutting through rough waters. Justin Harrison-Muñoz, the more experienced of Volaski’s two deck hands, had fished in Alaska before moving to California in 2020. Gerardo Barrera had never boarded a boat until he got a job with Volaski about five years ago. But he loved the work. “The ocean is my office, and I like that,” he told me. As the two loaded bait—a plastic trash can full of frozen mackerel—the rubbery sound of a barking sea lion rang through the marina.
Volaski showed up at 8, after finishing an all-night shift at the fire station, a job that helped support his fishing. He had grown up in a fishing family, and now was building his own operation. Wiry, with a neatly trimmed blonde mustache, he leapt aboard, and, with an air of efficiency, immediately fired up the motor and pulled away from the dock. On the way out to trap sites near California’s Channel Islands, Harrison-Muñoz chopped the mackerel and Barrera loaded chunks of it into small, bright-orange canisters with slits that would allow the crabs to sense the bait but not eat it.
Their target was the brown box crab (Lopholithodes foraminatus), an oddly charismatic crustacean with a spiky, mottled, peachy-pink shell. It looks like a cross between a pine cone and a dish scrubber. When alarmed, instead of snapping its claws at antagonists, the crab tucks its legs tightly against its body, forming the protective, boxy shape for which it is named.
Box crabs aren’t widely known as seafood. Unlike the more popular Dungeness crabs (Metacarcinus magister), which live in the shallows and the intertidal, box crabs can venture 600 meters (nearly 2,000 feet) below the surface—deeper than the tallest Los Angeles skyscraper is high. Partly because they are harder to reach, they have never sustained a commercial fishery long-term. But Volaski is part of a small but growing experiment to try to change that—and in the process demonstrate that commercial crab and lobster fishers can make a living without endangering whales.