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Image: King5 / FIS
How 10 billion snow crab vanished from Alaskan waters and what it means for the seafood industry
(UNITED STATES, 10/9/2023)
The following is an excerpt from an article published by King5:
A quiet early October day on the bay in Kodiak, Alaska looks idyllic, but it's a problem for local fishermen.
Early fall is usually when crabbers are frantically preparing for a long season that starts October 15, but this year is different. A huge portion of the crabbing season is canceled with the news that once again, snow crabs will not be caught in the Bering Sea.
 "On a normal year, you’d have people walking back and forth, boats transiting from the dock over here to here, putting pots on, getting gear ready," said commercial fisherman Gabriel Prout, who crabs with his family.
This is the second year in a row that the Alaskan crabbing industry is taking a hit, an unprecedented event.
"Bering Sea crab fishing has always been a very lucrative business," Prout said. "I remember stories from the 70s, even late 60s of guys coming back with a boatload of crab and going to buy gold watches with their earnings, making $100,000 in a month or two."
That changed in recent years when snow crabs virtually vanished from the Bering Sea.
This red flag was raised during the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's (NOAA) annual summer survey. Every year, NOAA spends months collecting data on the Bering Sea crab population.
Photo courtesy of GCaptain
That data is then reviewed by scientists and a council of leaders from Northwest states to set overfishing levels.
The state of Alaska ultimately sets the total for how many can be caught each year based on NOAA's research.
Recent years show drastic changes. In 2018, there were an estimated 12.2 billion snow crabs in the Baring Sea. In 2019, that number dropped to just shy of 5 billion snow crabs, but it wasn't enough to raise red flags at the time.
The summer survey was canceled in 2020 because of the pandemic. Then, in 2021 when the survey returned, those snow crab levels dropped to a little more than one billion total.
Kodiak-based NOAA Research Biologist Erin Fedeway says no one expected that drastic of a drop.
"It was evidentially a population collapse and the response basically was that 10 billion snow crab had disappeared from the system," Fedeway said.
"I did the bulk of the stations in the eastern Bering Sea that snow crabs typically inhabit and it was very apparent that something was wrong. We'd drop the net down at stations where we’d normally get thousands and thousands of juvenile snow crab and they were virtually absent from those high-density stations," said Fedeway, remembering the summer survey from 2021. [Continues...]
Author: Leah Pezzetti | King5 | Read the full article by clicking the link here
[email protected]
www.seafood.media
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