The Jonah crab is a large, red, deep-water crab and is among the largest crab caught on the East Coast of the United States. Similar to the common rock crab the differences are its large size, red color, thicker legs, and scalloped shells. The Jonah crab is a secondary catch to the off shore lobster fishery of the northern Atlantic and until the 1990s was consistently discarded by the lobster fishermen and considered a nuisance when they got into their traps.

The Jonah crab found its place in the market as a substitute for more expensive crab species such as blue, Dungeness and stone crab. The meat is considered of high quality and delicious with a flaky texture and the sweetness of crab. These attributes have helped the industry grow to sales of over 5 million pounds in 2009.

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The Jonahs are oval shaped like the Dungeness Crab of the west coast, but with bigger claws. They are genetically very close to the Dungeness Crab and are often referred to as Atlantic Dungeness. They have a white underside with a reddish shell. Raw meat will be translucent, while the cooked meat will be white, with tones of reddish-brown. Only abundant in certain areas of the Northeast, between Long Island and Nova Scotia, they are found among the rocks at the tide line to a depth of 2600 feet. The Jonah reaches a width of approximately six inches and the claws are relatively large which make them an inexpensive, year round substitute for stone crab claws.

With only a handful of processors specializing in this fishery, the quality of Jonah claws and crabmeat is very consistent. In Canada, there continues to be a limited offshore fishery for Jonah crab, even during the closed season for lobster.