The harvest of snow crabs in Alaska, in the United States, has been canceled. The reason is that the animal is said to have mysteriously disappeared from the waters there.
Reported CNNOn Sunday (10/16/2022), scientists said overfishing was not the cause. The cancellation of the harvest was the first time in history.
Billions of Alaskan snow crabs have disappeared from the cold and dangerous waters of the Bering Sea in recent years.
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The Alaska Fisheries Council and the North Pacific Fisheries Management Board announced last week that the snow crab population in the Bering Sea had fallen below the regulatory threshold for open fishing.
According to Benjamin Daly, researcher with the Alaska Department of Fisheries and Game, the spider crab population is shrinking from about 8 billion in 2018 to 1 billion in 2021.
“Snow crab is by far the most abundant of all commercially captured Bering Sea crab species. This includes dramatically reduced spawning,” Daly said.
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Alaskan king crab fisherman (Photo: Corey Arnold)
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The Bristol Bay Red King Crab harvest will also end for the second consecutive year. Officials cited overfishing as the reason they canceled the season.
Between surveys conducted in 2021 and 2022, adult male snow crabs declined by about 40%, with an estimated 45 million pounds remaining across the Bering Sea.
But the over-captured population of the Bering Sea Crab is urging conservation action.
“We call it overfishing because of its size. But it’s not overfishing that is causing the numbers to drop,” said Michael Litzow, director of NOAA’s fisheries laboratory.
Litzow said human-caused climate change was a major factor in the crab’s demise.
Snow crabs are a kind of cold water and are mostly found in areas where the water temperature is below 2 degrees Celsius, Litzow said. As the oceans warmed and the sea ice disappeared, the oceans around Alaska became inhospitable to the species.
Temperatures around the Arctic have warmed four times faster than the rest of the planet, scientists report. Climate change has triggered rapid loss of sea ice in the Arctic, particularly in Alaska’s Bering Sea, which in turn has increased global warming.
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