Two people have been fined after pulling the claws off crabs and throwing their legless bodies back into the ocean in White Rock, B.C., last week.

The Department of Fisheries and Oceans says Hsin Chan and Chun Li were charged and ticketed under the federal Fisheries Act for fishing without a licence and harvesting undersized Dungeness crab on Sept. 7.

RCMP said Li is from White Rock and Chan is a friend of hers, visiting from Belgium.

Andrew Newman, who owns a local whale watching company, called police and took video of their response. Newman posted the footage to social media which, at one point, shows the officer taking legs out of a woman's pocket, as they stand at the end of the dock.

Officials say crabs are likely to bleed to death if an appendage is torn off, because they don't have blood vessels the way mammals do.

RCMP confirmed to CBC that Li is the woman in the video. ​

In B.C., it's illegal to keep any part of a crab without its body because that's the part officials need to measure to ensure fishermen are following size regulations.

Those rules are in place because crabs without claws are less likely to survive, often bleeding to death.

With files from Ash Kelly