Alaska has cancelled this year's snow crab harvest for the first time ever after 90% of the snow crabs disappeared. BILLIONS of snow crabs vanished from the Bering Sea. By why? Why did billions of crabs disappear? Scientists are investigating, with many saying the snow crab population decline is caused by climate change.
I am a marine biologist with over a decade of experience working with marine mammals who prey on snow crabs. When the sea ice shrinks, juvenile snow crab are exposed to predators. So the snow crab have no choice but to migrate. That is just one of many possible reasons Alaskan officials are investigating for why the snow crab disappeared -- some believe climate change has forced the snow crabs to migrate into deeper waters of the Bering Sea or north into the colder waters of the Arctic.
Climate change is very real and Alaska is the fastest warming US state:
While the NOAA claims the snow crab disappearance was not caused by overfishing, it should be noted that they said the same about Alaskan king crab. King crab suffered a similar decline in the 80s that they still haven’t recovered from. Crab fishermen are at a loss because the Alaska king crab harvest has been cancelled for the second year in a row.
Alaskan fisheries employed an average of 29,400 commercial fishermen each year. The state of Alaska harvests more seafood than the rest of the US combined. Over 60% of the nation's seafood comes from Alaskan waters. With snow crab season cancelled because of the missing snow crabs, the thousands of crab fisherman are now wondering if they'll go out of business.
Last year, a biologist who worked at NOAA Fisheries filed a whistleblower complaint claiming the NOAA “ paved the way for the collapse of the king crab population by engaging in sampling bias and data falsification.” According to him, the real culprit was bycatch.
3 Comments
newtboyI expect this is just the beginning.
Populations of marine animals will migrate to new areas less suited for them (or try and fail), causing disruptions in their new location, spurring more migrations….
When this happens, local fishing industries collapse because their prey is gone and new invasive species either aren’t edible or aren’t caught with the gear they have (like Lionfish, inedible to most fish and mammals, and all but impossible to catch except by spear fishing).
Between ocean acidification, deep water warming, overfishing, invasive species, pollution, loss of ice packs, and other as yet unknown factors, the ocean’s ability to produce food is going to be severely limited in the near future. It already is, in fact.
The crab collapse isn’t the canary in the coal mine, it’s not even the first miner to drop dead. It’s like 1/4 of the entire night shift just disappeared….and they are all the engineers that keep things functioning.
This is like a massive corn blight on land. It not only kills the corn, it takes out everything that relies on corn too, like pigs, chickens, cattle, goats, pretty much any livestock, and an insanely large percentage of the calories humans eat too. A shitload of the ocean relies on crab meat, and more rely on crabs to keep the ocean floors clean….important if we don’t want clouds of hydrogen sulfide erupting from the ocean making all coastal states dead zones.
robdotThey were told for decades while they kept electing lunatics like Sarah Palin…
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