Yum @sartoric!
I'll be over right away. Well maybe not as you're a world away from me, but I will enjoy it vicariously. More details please?
I looked these things up when you mentioned them on the Breakfast thread. They seem to be huge beasts. Are you having a lot of guests over to help eat your bounty? We only get much smaller crabs from local waters, and thanks to government regs, they are almost always pre-boiled and quite dead.
We do get frozen king crab legs from Alaska, which are even huger than your mud/mangrove crabs, but they are never sold with their bodies in these parts. Is there any good eating in the bodies?
The exception is much smaller softshell crabs which are usually only available in restaurants, and I have never had any that I liked. Too chitininous for me, because you are supposed to eat the nascent shells along with the flesh of the fried whole crabs. Maybe I just haven't been to the right restaurant. These are the crabs that are seasonally molting out of their hard shells so they can grow bigger in a new one.
We do get live lobsters here and some Asian groceries sell live fish from their tanks, but no shrimp, alas. Quality can vary according to how long they have been kept in the tanks living in their own waste. I had some bad lobster once from our largest Asian store that just tasted muddy and not bright and delicious like lobsters should. It did not make me sick, thank God, but it tasted pretty bad.
