18 October 22
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Climate change is coming for your seafood buffet.
The Alaska Board of Fisheries and North Pacific Fishery Management Council announced last week that the population of snow crab in the Bering Sea fell below the regulatory threshold to open up the fishery. But the actual numbers behind that decision are shocking: The snow crab population shrank from around 8 billion in 2018 to 1 billion in 2021, according to Benjamin Daly, a researcher with the Alaska Department of Fish and Game. “Snow crab is by far the most abundant of all the Bering Sea crab species that is caught commercially,” Daly told CNN. “So the shock and awe of many billions missing from the population is worth noting – and that includes all the females and babies.” The Bristol Bay red king crab harvest will also be closed for the second year in a row, the agencies announced.
The typical explanation for something like this is overfishing, which is certainly an ongoing factor; but there’s something different, and ominous, about the circumstances this season.
“We call it overfishing because of the size level,” Michael Litzow, the Kodiak lab director for NOAA Fisheries, told CNN. “But it wasn’t overfishing that caused the collapse, that much is clear.” Litzow says human-caused climate change is a significant factor in the crabs’ alarming disappearance.
Snow crabs are cold-water species and found overwhelmingly in areas where water temperatures are below 2 degrees Celsius, Litzow says. As oceans warm and sea ice disappears, the ocean around Alaska is becoming inhospitable for the species. “There have been a number of attribution studies that have looked at specific temperatures in the Bering Sea or Bering Sea ice cover in 2018, and in those attribution studies, they’ve concluded that those temperatures and low-ice conditions in the Bering sea are a consequence of global warming,” Litzow said. Temperatures around the Arctic have warmed four times faster than the rest of the planet, scientists have reported. Climate change has triggered a rapid loss in sea ice in the Arctic region, particularly in Alaska’s Bering Sea, which in turn has amplified global warming.
Since last summer, officials have been tracking this decline, but it’s been obvious to the region’s fisherman since at least last year. From the Washington Post:
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. And then they weren’t there.
“It was a struggle,” Prout said. “We were pulling up close to blank pots. We’d be searching several miles of ocean floor and not even pulling up 100 crabs. We were grinding away and barely caught what we were allowed to catch.”
And there are massive real-world consequences at the source of the problem.
It is the main source of income for many of the 65 communities that make up the Western Alaska Community Development Quota Program, which allocates a portion of the annual fish harvest of certain commercial species directly to coalitions of villages that, because of geographic isolation and diminished access to sources of income, have had limited economic opportunities, says Heather McCarty, a fisheries consultant in Juneau.
“I work in the Pribilof Islands for an Aleut community of 450 people, which is heavily invested in the crab quota,” McCarty said. On the island of St. Paul, Trident Seafoods has one of the largest crab processing plants in the world, employing as many as 400 workers during peak snow crab season in February. This February, it was quiet. “The whole community of St. Paul is run on the fish tax. It’s 85 percent of the revenue of the community,” she said. “They had some [financial] reserves last year, but it’s not going to go well in the future. King crab has been declining for a while, but snow crab had been quite successful and took a nosedive that nobody expected.”
A way of life is being disrupted all over the Arctic regions—from subsistence hunters on the mainland to commercial fisherman plying some of the most dangerous waters on the planet. Waters that are now warmer than they should be, an adversary to man and crab alike.
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