A ‘very scary’ decline
Crabbers hope industry can rebound if strong conservation measures are put in place
Federal biologist Erin Fedewa boarded a research vessel in June in Dutch Harbor, Alaska, and journeyed to a swath of the Bering Sea that typically yields an abundance of young snow crab in annual surveys.
Not this summer. At this spot, and elsewhere, the sampling nets came up with stunningly few – a more than 99% drop in immature females compared to those found just three years earlier.
Biologists also found significant downturns in the numbers of mature snow crab as they painstakingly sorted through the sea life they hauled up.
“The juveniles obviously were a red flag, but just about every size of snow crab were in dramatic decline,” Fedewa said. “It’s very scary.”
This collapse in the Bering Sea snow crab population comes amid a decade of rapid climatic changes, which have scrambled one of the most productive marine ecosystems on the planet in ways that scientists are just beginning to understand. The changes are forcing them to reconsider how they develop models to forecast harvest seasons.
As waters warm, some older crab have moved northwest, young crab are being gobbled up by an increased number of predators and disease is on the rise. All of this could be making crab more vulnerable to excessive harvesting, and that has increased concern over the impacts of trawlers that accidentally scoop up crab as they drag nets along the sea floor targeting bottom-dwelling fish.
The forecast for the 2022 winter snow crab season is bleak. At best, it is expected to be considerably less than 12 million pounds. That would be down from a 2021 harvest of 45 million pounds and a fraction of the more than 300 million pounds taken during two peak years in the early 1990s.
The iconic Bering Sea red king crab, which can grow up to 24 pounds with a leg-span up to 5 feet, also are in trouble. In a big blow to the commercial crabbers, many of whom are based in Washington, the October harvest for these crab has been canceled, something that has only happened three times before.
Overall conservation measures are expected to wipe out most of the value of the annual Bering Sea crab harvest, worth more than $160 million during the past year, according to Jamie Goen, executive director of the Seattle-based Alaska Bering Sea Crabbers.
“We have gotten a double blow, and the economic impact is unlike anything we have experienced in this industry,” Goen said.
The harvest cutback also will hit some Alaska communities that rely on the crab fleets to help sustain their economies. St. Paul, in the Pribilof Islands northwest of Dutch Harbor, is the site of a major crab-processing plant operated by Seattle-based Trident Seafoods, and depends on crabbing not only to generate activity for its port but also to pay taxes that prop up the local government.
Crabbers want more done to protect crab from some types of fishing, including trawling.
Goen said that crabbers will be pressing fishery managers to step up protective measures, such as expanding zones where trawling is not permitted and finding a way to estimate the unseen death toll of crab passing under nets.
“We need other (fishing) sectors to come forward and protect the crab,” Goen said.
Though crab populations fluctuate, there also are cautionary tales of collapses in Alaska that continue to haunt the industry. In the 20th century, the Gulf of Alaska was the site of a major king crab fishery that boomed and then went bust. Shut down in the early 1980s, it has yet to resume.