Saving Seafood

ALASKA: Bering Sea snow crab season kicks off for first time in three years

January 29, 2025 — Earlier this month, commercial snow crabs started hitting Unalaska’s docks again, for the first time in nearly three years.

The Bering Sea snow crab fishery reopened in mid-October, after billions of the crab disappeared and the fishery was shut down in October 2022. This season’s first catch was delivered on Jan. 15. Opilio, or snow crab, is generally fished in the new year and into the early spring. The season runs through May.

Alaska Department of Fish and Game Area Management Biologist Ethan Nichols said nine vessels are actively participating in the Bering Sea commercial fishery.

“The fleet is just getting started, for the most part,” Nichols said. “Fishing so far — the reports from the grounds — there seems to be good numbers of nice, new shell, large snow crab on the far northern portions of the grounds.”

Nichols said right now the number of keepers per pot, also known as CPUE or catch per unit effort, is somewhat low coming in at 134, but that will increase as the season progresses.

“That’s only coming from a handful of our first deliveries, and that includes some prospecting by vessels early on in the season,” he said. “So far, the highest CPUEs are being seen on the northern portion of the grounds. And as vessels get more dialed in on those hot spots or those productive areas of fishing, they’ll be coming with full loads of crab that are more reflective of the hot spots on the grounds.”

Read the full article at KYUK

Alaska cities reach agreement on Bering Sea snow crab harvest

January 9, 2025 — The cities of Unalaska and St. Paul in the U.S. state of Alaska have reached an agreement to share revenue collected from the processing of 1.6 million pounds of Bering Sea snow crab.

After two years of closures, NOAA Fisheries announced in October 2024 that it would be opening up the Bering Sea crab fishery for a limited harvest with a 4.7 million pound total allowable catch (TAC). Around 1.6 million pounds of that TAC was designated for the North Region, which, according to a framework agreed to by harvesters and processors in September 2024, had to be processed in St. Paul.

Read the full article at SeafoodSource

ALASKA: What determines total allowable catch? Fish and Game breaks the equation down

October 16, 2024 — The Alaska Department of Fish and Game hosted its annual Bering Sea/Aleutian Islands Crab Industry Meeting on Friday.

Topics included Fish and Game’s formula for determining the total allowable catch (TAC) for certain crab seasons this year.

The meeting specifically focused on what those in the industry call the big three: Bering Sea crab stocks (which included Bering Sea snow crab), Tanner snow crab, and Bristol Bay red king crab.

“The public might not agree with some of the decisions that our group makes,” ADF&G researcher Ben Daly said. “Our aim for these meetings is at least to provide that level of transparency so they understand the thought process that the department goes through.”

Read the full article at Alaska News Source

In surprising move, Bering Sea snow crab fishery to reopen after 2 year closure

October 7, 2024 — The Alaska Department of Fish and Game announced Friday afternoon that Bering Sea fishermen will be allowed to harvest a total of about 4.7 million pounds of opilio, also known as snow crab, for the first time in two years. According to Fish and Game, estimates of total mature male biomass are above the threshold required to open the fishery.

The announcement comes as a surprise to many fishermen, after roughly 10 billion snow crabs disappeared from the Bering Sea over a span of four years, and Fish and Game closed the fishery in 2022. Recently, scientists have learned that the disappearance was likely due to ecological shifts, and there’s been little hope within the industry that stocks would recover anytime soon.

Read the full article at KUCB

US government allocates USD 40 million in financial relief for Alaska’s Bering Sea snow crab fishery

October 1, 2024 — The U.S. Department of Commerce has allocated USD 40 million (EUR 36 million) in financial relief to fishers and businesses impacted by the 2023/2024 Alaska Bering Sea snow crab fishery.

“As climate change continues to have severe impacts on the fisheries and ecosystems that are vital to Alaska’s economy, the Department of Commerce remains committed to providing disaster relief across the state,” U.S. Secretary of Commerce Gina M. Raimondo said. “This funding will help Alaskans recover from the Bering Sea Snow Crab Fishery disaster, support the community’s efforts to prevent future disasters, and keep jobs, recreation and cultural connections thriving.”

Read the full article at SeafoodSource

‘It’s still crisis mode’: Will Bering Sea snow crabbing season be canceled for third straight year?

September 30, 2024 — As the Pacific Northwest’s crabbing crisis continues, scientists are still working to determine if this year’s snow crabbing season will be canceled for a third straight year. 

“The reality of the situation is that until we see more recruitment into that large male size class that the fishery targets, it seems in conversations that the industry is preparing for closure,” said Erin Fedewa, a scientist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

Fedewa studies the species and collects population data that will eventually help determine the quantity crabbers can catch annually. However, the last five years have brought quite a few changes.

In 2019, there were record-high snow crabs in the Bering Sea and industry-wide optimism. In 2020, the annual survey was canceled, so no one knew the status of the crabs. Then, when Fedewa and her team returned to count the population in 2021, millions of crabs seemingly vanished.

What caused the swift decline?

Scientists at NOAA have since identified the main reason for the collapse as “an ecological shift from Arctic to sub-Arctic conditions in the southeastern Bering Sea due to human-caused climate change.”

It was discovered that the warmer water temperatures didn’t immediately kill the crabs, but when the waters got too warm, their metabolism increased. There wasn’t enough food to keep up with their caloric demand.

In addition to temperature changes, the team at NOAA noted other factors that indicate a shift from an Arctic to a sub-Arctic regime. They found a decline in sea ice and an increase in snow crab predators, a disease known to kill snow crabs, and areas of spring algal blooms.

The study also confirmed scientists’ initial beliefs that the population decline was not due to overfishing as the level of mortality was too high.

Read the full article at ABC 10

ALASKA: U.S. Department of Commerce allocates $39.5 million in funding for Alaska fishery disaster

September 25, 2024 — U.S. Secretary of Commerce Gina M. Raimondo announced today the allocation of $39.5 million to address a fishery resource disaster that occurred in the Alaska Bering Sea Snow Crab Fishery from 2023 to 2024.

“As climate change continues to have severe impacts on the fisheries and ecosystems that are vital to Alaska’s economy, the Department of Commerce remains committed to providing disaster relief across the state,” said Secretary Raimondo. “This funding will help Alaskans recover from the Bering Sea Snow Crab Fishery disaster, support the community’s efforts to prevent future disasters, and keep jobs, recreation and cultural connections thriving.”

Congress provided fishery resource disaster assistance funding in the 2022 and 2023 Disaster Relief Supplemental Appropriations Acts. NOAA Fisheries determined that this fishery is eligible to receive a funding allocation from those appropriations. The funds will improve the impacted fisheries’ long-term economic and environmental sustainability. The allocation may fund activities in support of commercial fishing and other associated industries affected by the disaster.

Read the full article at NOAA Fisheries 

 

NOAA study links massive Bering Sea snow crab loss to climate change

August 23, 2024 — Scientists had previously linked the crash of the Bering Sea snow crab population in recent years to warming ocean waters. But a new study released Wednesday by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration deepens the connection between human-caused climate change and the die-off.

Snow crabs are well suited for Arctic conditions. But Mike Litzow — the lead author of the report, which was published in the journal “Nature Climate Change” — said the southeastern Bering Sea is changing to more sub-Arctic conditions through a process called borealization. St. Matthew Island to the south, nothing north of 60 degrees’ latitude is included in the southeastern Bering Sea. It’s a process that’s also happening in terrestrial ecosystems in Alaska.

Read the full article at KMXT

ALASKA: Alaska’s snow crab season canceled for second year in a row as population fails to rebound

January 7, 2024 — Gabriel Prout is grateful for a modest haul of king crab, but it’s the vanishing of another crustacean variety that has the fishing port in Kodiak, Alaska, bracing for financial fallout; for the second year in a row, the lucrative snow crab season has been canceled.

“We’re still definitely in survival mode trying to find a way to stay in business,” he told CBS News.

When the season was canceled last year, there was a sense of confusion among the Alaska crab fisher community. Now, a sense of panic is taking hold in the state’s fisheries, which produce 60% of the nation’s seafood.

“It’s just still extremely difficult to fathom how we could go from a healthy population in the Bering Sea to two closures in a row,” Prout said.

And while he is barely holding on, others — like Joshua Songstad — have lost almost everything.

Read the full article at CBS News

ALASKA: Scientists say warming seas helped cause Alaska’s snow crab crash

November 18, 2023 — When scientists estimated that more than 10 billion snow crab had disappeared from the Eastern Bering Sea between 2018 and 2021, industry stakeholders and fisheries scientists had several ideas about where they’d gone.

Some thought bycatch, disease, cannibalism, or crab fishing, while others believed it could be predation from other sea animals like Pacific cod.

But now, scientists say they’ve distinguished the most likely cause for the disappearance. The culprit is a marine heatwave between 2018 and 2019, according to a new study authored by a group of scientists with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Mike Litzow is a co-author of the study and the director for NOAA’s Kodiak lab. He said starvation mediated by increased temperatures caused the collapse.

“Really the crab were not able to get the food they needed,” Litzow said. “They were just outstripping the resources that were available to them.” 

According to Litzow and his fellow researchers, the crab faced a number of compounding factors: First, higher temperatures meant increased metabolism so they needed more food; on top of that, there was less space for the crab to forage that food; and finally, the crab were just smaller than usual.

Researchers took data from the many possible hypotheses for the disappearance and they examined it alongside the data they have on the collapse. They examined possible mortality from a range of sources, including directed fishing from the snow crab industry as well as bitter crab syndrome — a fatal disease among crustaceans caused by parasites — and trawl bycatch.

“The take-home message is really that none of those other proposed mechanisms explains the collapse with the data we have,” Litzow said.

He said it’s tough to know what the collapse from increased ocean temperatures could mean for other species, but it’s safe to say we’ll probably see more marine heatwaves like this, and they’re likely to be bigger and more frequent, as the world continues warming.

Read the full article at KYUK