Snow crab Archives - Saving Seafood

Alaska’s snow crabs have disappeared. Where they went is a mystery.

August 22, 2022 — The theories are many. The crabs moved into Russian waters. They are dead because predators got them. They are dead because they ate each other. The crabs scuttled off the continental shelf and scientists just didn’t see them. Alien abduction.

Okay, not that last one. But everyone agrees on one point: The disappearance of Alaska’s snow crabs probably is connected to climate change. Marine biologists and those in the fishing industry fear the precipitous and unexpected crash of this luxury seafood item is a harbinger, a warning about how quickly a fishery can be wiped out in this new, volatile world.

Gabriel Prout and his brothers Sterling and Ashlan were blindsided. Harvests of Alaskan king crab — the bigger, craggier species that was the star of the television show “Deadliest Catch” — have been on a slow decline for over a decade. But in 2018 and 2019, scientists had seemingly great news about Alaska’s snow crabs: Record numbers of juvenile crabs were zooming around the ocean bottom, suggesting a massive haul for subsequent fishing seasons.

Prout, 32, and his brothers bought out their father’s partner, becoming part owners of the 116-foot Silver Spray. They took out loans and bought $4 million in rights to harvest a huge number of crabs. It was a year that many young commercial fishers in the Bering Sea bought into the fishery, going from deckhands to owners. Everyone was convinced the 2021 snow crab season was going to be huge.

Read full article at The Washington Post

Scientists point to climate change as likely cause for Alaska snow crab decline

June 17, 2022 — Even as scientists are still trying to figure out why the Bering Sea snow crab stock crashed in 2021, federal managers are working on a plan to help rebuild it.

The North Pacific Fishery Management Council last week voted to accept alternatives for analysis on its snow crab rebuilding plan — a middle step before implementing an actual plan that will change fishing regulations or openings. The council is on track to approve a final plan for action in December, which would then go to the Secretary of Commerce and through the federal regulation process before becoming official.

Data from last year’s survey at this point seems to confirm that there was a massive decline in the number of young snow crab in the Eastern Bering Sea — something like 99% fewer female snow crab showed up in the survey from 2021.

There’s no complete consensus about why the stock crashed in the first place. Increasingly, however, the models seem to indicate that it’s due to temperature increases linked to climate change.

Read the full story at the Anchorage Daily News

Bering Sea crabbers and communities are struggling with Alaska’s snow crab decline

April 21, 2022 — Bering Sea crabbers and communities in the region are struggling with a steep decline in snow crab this year, likely the result of climate change.

That caused the crab fleet to push farther north than usual and forced places like St. Paul to consider major budget shortfalls, because the Pribilof Island city depends on taxes from fish and crab processing.

The snow crab crash and its impacts are the subject of a recent reporting collaboration between the Seattle Times, the Anchorage Daily News and the Pulitzer Center’s Connected Coastlines reporting initiative.

As part of the “Into the Ice” series, Seattle Times reporter Hal Bernton and ADN photographer Loren Holmes spent two weeks in January aboard a crab boat called the Pinnacle, one of the biggest in the fleet at 137 feet.

Read the full story at KTOO

ALASKA: Snow crab decline hits Bering Sea island community of St. Paul

April 11, 2022 — The Trident Seafoods plant tucked inside this island’s small port is the largest snow crab processor in the nation.

On a cold clear day in January, three Trident workers, within the hold of the Seattle-based Pinnacle, grabbed bunches of the shellfish, and placed them in an enormous brailer basket for their brief trip across a dock. The crab were fed into a hopper to be butchered, cooked, brined and frozen.

Few of the 360 people who live on St. Paul, largest of the four Pribilof Islands, have opted to work in the plant. Instead jobs are filled with recruits from elsewhere.

But the plant still remains a financial underpinning of this Aleut community. Trident pays taxes that help bankroll the expansive services of a city government, which rents apartments, leases construction equipment and even provides plumbers and electricians to make repairs.

This year, the snow crab harvest dropped nearly 90% in a body blow to the city’s budget and to its efforts to keep people from moving away.

City officials estimate the decline in the snow crab harvest, along with the cancellation of the 2021 fall king crab harvest, will result in a loss of $3.25 million in tax revenue. That amount is equal to nearly half of this year’s budget, so city officials in 2023 will have to decide what services to maintain and what they might have to cut back or give up.

Read the full story at The Seattle Times

AK Bering Sea snow crab: Still on hold

February 7, 2022 — What’s the plan for Alaska’s Bering Sea snow crab fishery? As it turns out, we may not know until June.

An unexpected and precipitous drop in the snow crab (Chionoecetes opilio) estimated biomass resulted in an official “overfished” designation from NMFS on Oct. 19, 2021. The designation was not unexpected, given the 2021 stock assessment. The path forward, however, is as clear as Bering Sea chop in a February storm.

“What we do know is that snow crab is a variable stock where highs and lows are not unexpected. What is different is the magnitude of the high and quickly falling to a historic low,” Jamie Goen, executive director of the Alaska Bering Sea Crabbers, told National Fisherman. “We’re hopeful seeing some crab out there this season and look forward to working with the federal and state managers through the rebuilding plan process to help bring snow crab stocks back to higher levels.”

The 2021 stock assessment, which was presented to the North Pacific Fishery Management Council in October, reported that the minimum threshold for the biomass of mature male opilios is 76,700 metric tons, and the most recent assessment estimated it at 50,600 metric tons — a historic low.

“A large year class recruited to the survey gear in 2015 and was tracked until 2018 and 2019,” the assessment report says. “But it appears to have since disappeared from the eastern Bering Sea shelf before reaching commercial size.”

Read the full story at National Fisherman

Bering Sea snow crab designated as “overfished”

February 4, 2022 — An unexpected and precipitous drop in the estimated biomass for Alaska snow crab has resulted in an official “overfished” designation.

The designation, made retroactive to 19 October, 2021, was in response to the the 2021 stock assessment, which was presented to the North Pacific Fishery Management Council in October and reported that the minimum threshold for the biomass of mature male opilios is 76,700 metric tons, and the most recent assessment estimated it at 50,600 metric tons – a historic low.

Read the full story at SeafoodSource

Alaska crab population crash blamed on mysterious mortality event

November 5, 2021 — A crash in crab populations in the U.S. state of Alaska is being partially blamed on a mortality event scientists cannot fully explain.

A catastrophic drop in Alaska’s snow crab population led the state to set a much lower quota for the upcoming season. Along with a significant drop to the Bering Sea bairdi crab quota and the closure of the winter Bristol Bay red king crab fishery, Alaska’s overall crab fishery could lose up to USD 100 million (EUR 86.5 million) or more in value in the 2021-2022 season, according to the Alaska Bering Sea Crabbers.

Read the full story at SeafoodSource

Dungeness emerges as Alaska’s top crab fishery

November 4, 2021 — It’s hard to believe, but Dungeness crab in the Gulf of Alaska is now Alaska’s largest crab fishery — a distinction due to the collapse of stocks in the Bering Sea.

Combined Dungeness catches so far from Southeast and the westward region (Kodiak, Chignik and the Alaska Peninsula) totaled over 7.5 million pounds as the last pots were being pulled at the end of October.

Ranking second is golden king crab taken along the Aleutian Islands with a harvest by four boats of about 6 million pounds.

For snow crab, long the Bering Sea’s most productive shellfish fishery, the catch was cut by 88% to 5.6 million pounds this season.

The Gulf’s Dungeness fishery will provide a nice payday for crabbers. The dungies, which weigh just over two pounds on average, were fetching $4.21 per pound for 209 permit holders at Southeast who will share in the value of over $14 million.

Read the full story at the Anchorage Daily News

Valuable crab populations are in a ‘very scary’ decline in warming Bering Sea

September 22, 2021 — 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.

Read the full story at the Seattle Times

Good news in the crab fishery comes from the Gulf of Alaska

September 21, 2021 –Unlike in the Bering Sea, there’s good news for crab in the Gulf of Alaska.

A huge cohort of Tanner crab that biologists have been tracking in the Westward region for three years showed up again in this summer’s survey.

“We were optimistic and we did find them again. Pretty much all the way across the board from Kodiak all the way out to False Pass, we found those crab and in good quantity,” said Nat Nichols, area manager for the Alaska Department of Fish and Game at Kodiak.

The bairdi Tanners are the larger cousins of snow crab (opilio Tanners) found in the Bering Sea.

“The very, very rough preliminary numbers look like we’ve at least hit the minimum abundance thresholds in all three areas of Kodiak, Chignik and the South Peninsula. So we’re excited about that.”

The last Tanner opener was in 2020 for 400,000 pounds, the minimum abundance number for a district to have a fishery. A fleet of 49 boats participated in that fishery and averaged over $4 per pound for the harvestable male crabs that typically weigh 2-4 pounds.

Read the full story at the Anchorage Daily News