December 10, 2025 –A team of researchers working in the Barents Sea found a simple “escape hatch” modification to snow crab pots could have big benefits for the fishery’s sustainability and efficiency.
The research, lead by Heriot-Watt University and UiT The Arctic University of Norway found adding circular “escape gaps” to traditional crab pots used in the snow crab fishery allowed smaller crabs to escape the gear before it was retrieved by fishing vessels.
December 9, 2025 — The U.S. state of Alaska has asked the U.S. Department of Commerce to issue a fishery disaster determination for the 2024/2025 Bering Sea snow crab season, which despite reopening after two years of closure, remains well below recent averages in terms of both harvest and revenue.
“The snow crab fishery has historically been the most productive crab fishery in the Bering Sea and supported one of the most valuable commercial fisheries in the Arctic,” Alaska Governor Mike Dunleavy said in his letter, which noted that the fishery recorded gross revenue peaking at USD 219 million (EUR 188 million) in the 2020/2021 season.
December 8, 2025 — A new study addresses one of the largest mass mortality events in recent marine history—the abrupt collapse of the snow crab population in the eastern Bering Sea. The research team was led by NOAA Alaska Fisheries Science Center fishery biologist Erin Fedewa. They set out to identify potential factors driving the increased mortality, population collapse, and recovery potential of Bering Sea snow crab.
Erin and her team measured snow crab energy reserves during and after the 2018–2019 marine heatwave and population collapse. This approach is the first of its kind for Bering Sea crab stocks. Findings show that warmer conditions and high population density led to energetic limitations—likely causing the snow crab population collapse.
A New, Rapid Energetic Condition Metric for Fisheries Management
Poor energetic condition is a state in which crabs have low energy reserves. This can increase starvation and mortality risk, emphasizing the importance of monitoring the energetic condition of individuals in marine populations. Techniques used to monitor energy reserves in fish often rely on data collected rapidly during annual scientific surveys, such as the weight-at-size of individual fish.
However, snow crabs have exoskeletons; they molt as juveniles, which uses a lot of their energy stores. They require more sensitive techniques to detect energy reserves beyond simple length-weight measurements. These techniques are often time-intensive and costly. Scientists have not routinely monitored energetic condition in Bering Sea crab populations to date.
November 26, 2025 — Each December the North Pacific Fishery Management Council sets the Total Allowable Catches (TACs) for all groundfish species in federal waters of the Bering Sea and Gulf of Alaska for two years. Those waters – from three to 200 miles out – provide over 60% of Alaska’s total fishery landings.
This massive range covers approximately 900,000 square miles and includes over 140 fish and crab species through six different Fishery Management Plans (FMPs).
The value of the combined groundfish fisheries tops $2 billion annually at first wholesale (the value after primary processing). Of that, nearly 75% leaves the state of Alaska and goes primarily to Seattle.
The North Pacific Council also sets the rates of bycatch that go along with all those groundfish catches.
Bering Sea trawl bycatch tops the allowed takes of snow crab and Tanner crab for fishermen
Crab bycatch numbers are indicated as individual animals by fishery managers, but to make things more confusing, crab catches by fishermen are listed in poundage.
For the 2025/2026 season, crabbers are allocated 2.68 million pounds of red king crab. That equals about 382,857 crabs based on an average weight of 7 pounds each. The allowable trawl bycatch for red king crab is 97,000 animals.
For Snow crab (opilio), the fishermen’s catch of 9.3 million pounds adds up to 6.2 million individual crabs weighing 1.5 pounds on average.
The allowable trawl bycatch for Snow crab is 12,850,000 animals.
For bairdi Tanner crab, the crabber’s pots can haul up a total of 11.25 million pounds – 10.12 million pounds from the Western district and 1.13 million pounds from the Eastern district. That equals 3.75 million crabs, based on an average weight of three pounds per crab.
The allowable trawl bycatch for bairdi Tanners is 3.95 million animals.
By far, most of the crab and halibut bycatch is taken by the Seattle-based Amendment 80 fleet of nearly 20 huge factory trawlers that drag the bottom of the Bering Sea for flounders and other groundfish.
November 20, 2025 — Just a few years ago, Alaska’s crabbers were staring down one of the darkest chapters in their fishery’s history. The Bristol Bay red king crab, snow crab, and bairdi seasons had been closed or severely restricted, vessels sat idle at the docks, and the fleet that once helped define Alaska’s working waterfront was struggling to hold on.
But this year, as the Bering Sea fleet looks out over a brighter horizon, there’s cautious optimism that the tide is finally turning. “We’ve been through an epic storm these last few years,” said Jamie Goen, executive director of Alaska Bering Sea Crabbers (ABSC). “But Alaska’s Bering Sea crabbers are coming out the other side and are optimistic for the future.”
Between 2019 and 2021, NOAA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s bottom trawl survey estimated that roughly 10 billion snow crab disappeared. Now, in 2025, about 7 billion have returned, a rebound that Goen calls “one heck of a comeback.”
The turnaround wasn’t just by luck. It came through hard decisions and scientific collaboration. “When crab stocks tanked, managers tightened things up, cutting exploitation rates on red king and snow crab,” Goen explained. “At the time, it hurt. But looking back, it was the right call. Stocks are rebuilding, and we’ve learned to appreciate that extra precaution.”
Bristol Bay red king crab have stabilized, and snow and bairdi harvest levels have doubled, with western bairdi now at their strongest in more than 20 years. Meanwhile, a new mariculture project and coordinated habitat surveys are exploring how to boost red king crab recruitment and identify prime areas for releasing hatchery-reared juveniles.
November 20, 2025 — Financial relief is finally reaching Alaska fishermen, roughly four years after the crab crash hit the Bering Sea fleet.
The payments cover Bristol Bay red king crab and Bering Sea snow crab fisheries from the 2021-2022 and 2022-2023 seasons, when stocks collapsed and the fisheries remained closed.
The trade group Alaska Bering Sea Crabbers coordinated with harvesters, processors and communities to ask Gov. Mike Dunleavy to request a federal disaster declaration, which the U.S. Secretary of Commerce approved in May 2023.
November 18, 2025 — Changing ocean conditions threaten lives, livelihoods, and invaluable marine resources across the United States. From marine heatwaves and the collapse of snow crab populations in Alaska, to last year’s historic hurricane season, the day-to-day realities of people throughout the nation are being impacted by reduced food security, increased operational costs for fisheries, and higher seafood costs for consumers.
To help fishing communities and fisheries managers anticipate and respond to these challenges, NOAA is leading a nationwide effort called the Changing Ecosystems and Fisheries Initiative. This initiative is building a powerful new ocean forecasting system that delivers short and long-term predictions of future ocean and ecosystem conditions. Through a combination of high-resolution modeling and community engagement, it aims to provide the information needed to support food security, protect American fisheries, and strengthen coastal economies in the face of rapid changes.
October 24, 2025 — After 3 weeks crisscrossing the frigid Bering Sea, much of it spent wrangling crabs scooped from the sea floor, Erin Fedewa faced a final challenge: getting nearly 200 live animals to a lab 3000 kilometers away in less than 24 hours.
“This is always a little bit risky,” said Fedewa, a fisheries biologist from the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), as she stood on the deck of the Northwest Explorer, a 49-meter trawler converted for a summer research trip, while the ship was moored at Nome’s port.
She lifted the lid on a waist-high blue plastic box and peered inside. There, immersed in 900 liters of seawater, lay her charges—dozens of what appeared to be enormous spiders, their leg spans the size of hub caps. Chunks of sea ice bobbed beside these snow crabs (Chionoecetes opilio), stirred by a pump to keep the animals bathed in the coldest water possible.
For Fedewa, success would mean the difference between months of productive research and de facto crab stew. She learned this the hard way in 2022, when the ship on which she was working docked in Nome and scientists filled the crab tanks with water siphoned directly from Norton Sound, a shallow, warmer part of the Bering Sea. “They just died,” she said.
That small fiasco is a microcosm of the recent fate of snow crabs in much of the Bering Sea. An unprecedented underwater heat wave there in 2018 and ’19 set off a chain reaction that led to the disappearance of an estimated 47 billion crabs, one of the largest marine die-offs ever documented. Suddenly, a $150 million fishery mythologized in the Deadliest Catch reality TV show found itself with no catch at all. State regulators for the first time banned Bering Sea snow crab fishing in 2023 and ’24, and the U.S. government declared a federal fishery disaster. The fishery reopened this year. But crabbing boats were only allowed to haul in a tiny fraction of what they had caught previously. The collapse “has had massive impacts,” says Scott Goodman, a fisheries biologist and executive director of the Bering Sea Fisheries Research Foundation, which is funded by the crab industry.
October 9, 2025 — Snow crab stocks in Alaska’s Bering Sea, which crashed a few years ago, have recovered enough to allow a modest harvest starting in mid-October.
The Alaska Department of Fish and Game on Monday announced that fishermen will be allowed to harvest 9.3 million pounds of Bering Sea snow crab from Oct. 15 to May. The harvest cap is about twice the 4.72 million pounds allowed in the past season, which followed an unprecedented two-year period of closed harvests.
The Bering Sea snow crab harvest closures came after catastrophic losses that scientists have attributed to an intense, multiyear marine heatwave that started in 2018.
October 8, 2025 — Bering Sea crabbers will see a boost in catch limits this season, after years of cancellations and small harvests due to low snow and king crab stocks.
The Alaska Department of Fish and Game announced Monday that it’s nearly doubling the harvest for the upcoming Bering Sea snow crab commercial fishing season from last year’s totals.
Fish and Game set the cap at 9.3 million pounds. That’s a low number compared to historic levels. In 1991, crabbers harvested more than 320 million pounds of snow crab.
The catch limit was set at 45 million pounds back in 2020, the year before the snow crab stock crashed. And the next year, the fishery closed for two seasons after more than 10 billion snow crabs disappeared from the region.