Bering Sea snow crab decline causes first-ever season closure
For the first time in state history, the Alaska Department of Fish & Game has closed the Bering Sea’s winter snow crab season. Also known as the opilio crab, the population’s numbers have plummeted in the last few years, puzzling scientists and fisheries managers.
“We’re at a level now we’ve never been before in the past, in terms of population numbers, and so it’s a scary place to be,” said Ben Daly, a research coordinator with ADF&G in Kodiak.
ADF&G made the announcement last Monday, Oct. 10, citing the results of the 2022 trawl survey conducted by the National Marine Fisheries Service.
“The stock is estimated to be below the ADF&G regulatory threshold for opening a fishery.” the agency said in its advisory. “Therefore, Bering Sea snow crab will remain closed for the 2022/23 season.”
Daly told The Nome Nugget that the snow crab surveys have been going on since 1975, and in 2018, scientists recorded some of the strongest abundance numbers they’ve ever seen. The 2020 survey had to be canceled due to COVID-19, and then last year’s survey produced worrying results.
“In 2021, it was shocking that we had such a dramatic decline that occurred so quickly,” Daly said. “Then 2022 came around, and we saw even further declines in the critical portions of the population that are needed for both the fishery and the population reproduction—and that is mature male biomass, which was, in 2022, the lowest we’ve had in the entire time series.”
Daly said it’s still unclear what exactly caused the population decline. He noted that 2018 and 2019 were both very warm years, producing environmental conditions that could have contributed to the mass mortality.
“We don’t know precisely what caused that mortality event,” Daly said. “There’s some theories out there, but we believe it is a mortality event as opposed to a mass migration outside of the survey area.”
There are efforts underway to understand what happened and what to do going forward, Daly said. He said researchers are looking into diseases such as Bitter Crab Syndrome as well as how environmental factors affect the spatial distribution of crabs.
“One of the challenges we have with managing crab in general is that we don’t know where the bottom is, with regards to the population numbers, before reproductive failure starts occurring,” Daly said. “When the males and the females aren’t mating because abundance levels are so low that the densities on the ocean bottom are so sparse that physically the animals can’t find each other to mate, that’s an extremely dire situation. And we don’t know what the density is that would start causing that to occur. But it’s one of the reasons that we’re very concerned right now for the conservation of population. We’re just at these critically low levels that we’ve never seen before.”
ADF&G also canceled the Bristol
Bay red king crab season for the second year in a row, which was less surprising than the snow crab fishery closure as the population has been declining for the last two decades.
The Norton Sound Economic Development Corporation owns quotas for both snow crab and Bristol Bay red king crab. Simon Kinneen, who is NSEDC’s vice president and the quota and acquisitions manager, said the organization was somewhat prepared for the news as last year the red king crab season had been closed and the opilio quota had already been cut by 90 percent.
“With the signals seen in fishery models and survey results we were able to largely budget this season’s cuts into our annual spending plan but did not anticipate full closure of the opilio fishery,” Kinneen told the Nugget. “The net result of these closures will be reduced income for the harvest of our quotas, and one of our harvesting vessels which typically focuses on opilio crab beginning in January will see reduced fishing opportunity for the year.”
However, Kinneen said he did not expect the closures “to significantly impact NSEDC’s ability to deliver our benefit programs and provide regional fishery support” as NSEDC is “well-diversified” in Bering Sea and Aleutian Island fisheries.
Kinneen also did not expect the closures to have much of an impact on the smaller local fisheries in the Norton Sound.
“The reduction in Bering Sea crab quotas in itself would typically result in a strengthened crab market for remaining species such as Norton Sound red king crab,” Kinneen said. But other factors may prevent that from happening. Kinneen said there is a large inventory of Russian crab in the marketplace that was purchased by U.S. buyers prior to the Russian seafood embargo taking effect. He also cited the decreased consumer demand due to challenging economic conditions.