Crab is a lucrative market for blue-collar workers across the world’s oceans. The Alaskan king crab can cost a couple of hundred dollars per meal in restaurants targeted to a wealthy clientele. Snow crab is not cheap but is more affordable for those of us of lesser means. A mass mortality event in Alaska’s Bering Sea will likely cause astronomical price increases on the delicacies. Restaurants now depend on other sources, such as Norway.
The massive King crab can weigh twenty pounds, and due to population drops since the 1990s, the species has been banned from commercial harvesting since October of 2021. Alaska Department of Fish and Game is not expected to change the ban for the 2022 - 2023 season. Benthic species such as halibut, skates, cod, and other crabs feed on them. They are, however, mainly vulnerable to predation when they molt.
Fishermen are bracing for a total ban on snow crab this coming season. Many coastal indigenous tribes depend on the snow crab for their living, but crab pots are being pulled up empty. Laura Reiley from the Washington Post noted that “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.”
Welcome to the Anthropocene, where warming waters can wipe out an industry overnight. Crabbers do not get “crop insurance” like the farmers who Donald Trump bailed out of due to his trade war with China in 2017. Communities that work in the sea either sink or swim with the marine ecosystem. In Alaska, fishermen and crabbers have begun to sell their boats.
NOAA is convinced that the plummet in crab population is from a Mass Mortality Event (MME) from rapidly warming waters, including marine heatwaves in the Bering Sea (a marginal sea of the North Pacific). If migration to colder waters has occurred, which some suspect but NOAA rules out, fishing boats can’t follow as the seas to the north are even more dangerous and deadly than those of the Bering, e.g., The Deadliest Catch.
“We don’t have data to specifically say what happened,” said the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Bob Foy, the science and research director of the agency’s Alaska Fisheries Science Center. “What we know is that we had extreme heat wave in 2019, and we had numerous fish and crab stocks moving into areas they hadn’t been historically. The fishery moved its effort toward the northwest.”
But movement alone doesn’t explain it. Crabs are a benthic species, meaning they crawl around on the ocean bottom and are not able to migrate as quickly as many finfish.
“The biomass of crabs up there at St. Lawrence Island [northwest of mainland Alaska in the Bering Sea] didn’t change much. What that suggests is there was a large mortality event or they moved into deeper water beyond our survey or into the Russian shelf,” Foy said, but he sounds skeptical about that last possibility. “The magnitude of biomass could not all have moved without us detecting it. We believe we had a very large mortality event, which points to an extreme event that we have never seen before in the Bering Sea.”
He said the crabs, perhaps because of heightened sensitivity to their ecosystem, are like the canary in a coal mine — for the climate and those who make their living from crabbing.
Some species will flourish with climate change, as had a salmon population explosion in Bristol Bay. Other species will disappear. Crabs move on the ocean floor and can not migrate to new areas as efficiently as other species, such as finfish.
The crash of snow crabs was not expected. They have been thriving for quite a while, but no more; a ninety percent drop occurred from last year.
An eye-opening video by scientist Michael Jacox of NOAA interviewed on marine heatwaves on the PBS Newshour.
Marine biologists in B.C. are sounding the alarm on declining salmon and shellfish stocks amid rising temperatures and worsening heatwaves in the Pacific Northwest. Experts warn that many of the local species B.C. takes pride in — namely salmon, mussels, and clams — may soon disappear from seafood menus across the province as human-caused climate change forces cold-water species to move north.
In their stead, marine life that prefer warmer water may replace them — like the Humboldt squid, whose native habitat stretches from Tierra del Fuego in South America up to California.
Gone may be the days when B.C. restaurants proudly proclaim they serve locally caught salmon. Fans of the fish may have to travel to Alaska to enjoy it — and sooner rather than later.