Board of Fisheries rejects petition to close red king crab fishing

The Alaska Board of Fisheries met via the internet on Tuesday, March 9, to consider the petition from the Northern Norton Sound Advisory Committee to close the red king crab commercial fishery for the remainder of 2021. By a vote of 4 to 1 the board rejected the petition. “Quite honestly this doesn’t pass the sniff test,” said board member Israel Peyton in summing up his position on the petition. “I can’t sit here with a straight face and come up with any reasonable argument to counter what the department has presented here.” Speaking for the Alaska Department of Fish and Game was area manager Jim Menard, who described with meticulous detail how the department has come to its position on the conduct of the commercial season.

Menard’s presentation included a dizzying array of big numbers and percentages. He reported the summer fishery accounts for 80 to 90 percent of the harvest, which averages 300,000 lbs. The winter commercial fishery runs around 23,000 lbs, the winter subsistence fishery around 10,000 lbs, and the summer subsistence fishery 3,000 lbs.

The North Pacific Fisheries Management Council sets the acceptable biological catch level and the overfishing limit based on the recommendations of the council’s Scientific and Statistical Committee. The Alaska Department of Fish and Game then sets the guideline harvest level, GHL for short, and manages the fishery so that it does not exceed the allowable biological catch, the ABC. From there it gets to be more complex, but the objective of ADF&G is that the resource is protected from overfishing. Last year, the 2020 season, the fishing grounds were limited to east of 167° W longitude. That ended commercial fishing as the fishery is worked by small boats and it wasn’t economically viable for them to travel that far.

The calculations for the amount of crab available for the fishermen are from one source: a 2020 trawl survey. “The petitioner is convinced the 2020 bottom trawl survey is incorrect,” said Menard.

The petition was written by Charlie Lean, who states, “We believe we have a conservation crisis and meet the criteria for an emergency closure of the fishery. Our petition outlines the biological conditions and the regulatory actions that are requirements given the stock status.”

According to Lean, only 10 percent of the 134 males sampled in the trawl survey were of legal size. “The current winter subsistence catches in 2021 are showing low numbers of legal-size crab and virtually no postrecruit crab,” he writes in the petition. “Local resource users are frustrated with the poor opportunities for harvesting crab of a size they are accustomed to eating. We find no reason to believe the projections quoted to produce either the ABC or the GHL.” Lean goes on to say that a recovered stock is in the best interest of subsistence and commercial users alike. “The current dependency on a model that clearly has lost the predictive utility to advise management on developing a GHL is irresponsible.”

One of the board members asked what is the situation with the market and the buyers? Jim Menard answered that there is just one buyer, NSEDC, located in Nome, and that their board voted not to buy winter crab for this season.

Board Member Israel Peyton asked, “Is there an emergency?” For the board to agree to stop the commercial crab fishing season they’d need an emergency. “Is there something unforeseen or unexpected that threatens a fish and game resource?” He pointed out there are 20 to 30 scientists who live, eat and breathe crab. A lot of time, energy and money goes into understanding this crab resource.

One board member pointed out that stakeholders rarely come to the

board and plead “Please close our fishery.” To this board member John Jensen responded: “My observation last year was a lot of it was personality driven in the discussions last year.”

“The folks that are closest to the resource have some of the best knowledge,” said Board Member Marit Carlson-Van Dort. “Irrespective of all the models in the world.”

The question was called and the vote was 4 to 1 against accepting the petition. “No finding of an emergency,” said Van Dort. “I’ll be interested in following what happens with the summer fishery.”