May 18, 2026 — Oregon’s valuable commercial Dungeness crab fishery has seen significant changes in recent years as the state looks to minimize and monitor whale entanglements involving gear used in the fishery.
Now more changes are on the horizon. And looming over everything is uncertainty around the details of a federal permit the state is seeking that would allow the fishery to have some degree of impact on endangered humpback populations.
Many of the recent tweaks and additions to Dungeness crab fishery operations are in fact tied to a conservation plan the state is required to complete in order to obtain the incidental take permit under Section 10 of the federal Endangered Species Act. This permit could provide some certainty to fishermen that even if their gear is implicated in humpback whale entanglements, fishing won’t immediately be shut down. The submittal process is underway now, but state fishery managers say it could be several years before a permit is issued.
An industry meeting in Astoria on Thursday hosted by Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife staff was intended to brief local commercial crabbers and gather input from them ahead of a meeting in August where Oregon Fish and Wildlife commissioners are expected to consider a suite of new regulations connected to the conservation plan, including the possibility of electronic vessel monitoring for the upcoming season, the use of experimental fishing gear and making what had been a temporary rule to close the fishery a month early permanent.
But the main question on crabbers’ minds was the federal take permit and how many whales NOAA Fisheries might allow the state fishery to impact. For them it is the question that nearly everything else revolves around.