How to buy legal king crab, and why the informal one is cheaper

King crab is also sold outside established commerce, and the price gap is large enough that the question raises itself. It is worth understanding what explains that gap, because it is not efficiency.

What the rules require

• Trap-only harvesting, by boats with the resource registered in the Artisanal Fishing Registry.
• Legal minimum size of 12 centimetres of carapace length.
• Discarding of all females: they are under permanent closure.
• A season set by decree. The 2026 one runs from 15 July to 15 December, under Decree 229/2025.
• Processing in authorised facilities and documentation proving legal origin.

What to ask for when buying

Sernapesca puts it plainly: buy «only from established, authorised premises offering king crab in properly labelled packaging». The label is not red tape: it is the only proof the animal left the water within the rules.

Why the informal one is cheaper

Because it saves the three things that make the legal one expensive: the minimum size, the female closure and authorised processing. Sernapesca’s regional director in Magallanes, Ximena Gallardo Andrade, put it this way in August 2026: «Unfortunately, what is traded through social media or through illegal means constitutes precisely illegal fishing».

There is also a fact worth keeping in mind in the kitchen: a significant share of the king crab circulating in informal commerce comes from females, whose extraction is permanently banned. Buying cheap there is not a bargain: it is buying an animal that should never have left the water.

What is documented and what is not

It is documented that the authority identifies social media as a channel of illegal trade, and that it has made seizures: 388.72 kilos at Bahía Mansa in September 2025, close to a kilometre of net in Puerto Natales in 2026. It is not documented, in any public source we have been able to open, that a specific platform is the main sales channel for this product. That leap we do not make.