When my son was young, we loved watching together “Deadliest Catch,” a documentary series focused on the adventures and challenges of the Alaskan crab fishermen.
Unfortunately for all of Alaska’s fishermen, the snow crab season has been canceled due to a crash in the crab population.
The Alaska Department of Fish and Game announced Monday that the Bering Sea snow crab season will remain closed through the spring of 2023.The season was expected to kick off in just days, but a survey by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration [NOAA] Fisheries found a lack of adult crabs available for harvest.“We use those numbers in an assessment model that get plugged into harvest strategy that annually determines the amount of crowd that can get harvested,” Miranda Westphal, a biologist with Alaska’s Department of Fish and Game, said.NOAA surveys are conducted each year to help guide managing organizations with restrictions and limitations put on species during the fishing and hunting seasons.
It is estimated that the population levels have been reduced substantially from 2018 levels, and preliminary assessments indicate that overfishing is a significant factor.
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.Officials cited over-fishing as their rationale for canceling the seasons. Mark Stichert, the groundfish and shellfish fisheries management coordinator with the state’s fish and game department, said that more crab were being fished out of the oceans than could be naturally replaced.“So there were more removals from the population than there were inputs,” Stichert explained at Thursday’s meeting.
The development is coming as a surprise to the Alaskan fishing industry, based on catches from recent years.
The fishing industry was hoping for a snow crab surge this year.In 2018, the ADFG recorded the largest juvenile snow crab spike in the fishery’s history, according to [Miranda Westphal, an area management biologist with the Alaska Department of Fish and Game], sparking hope that the fishing stock would rise. In 2019, the juvenile population was still high and promising. That year, the Bering Sea saw a historic spike in water temperatures.The ADFG didn’t conduct a survey in 2020 due to COVID-19. When the agency returned to count crabs in 2021, it discovered “the biggest crash we’ve ever seen in snow crab,” Westphal said.
The industry is bracing for pain.
Jamie Goen, executive director of the Alaska Bering Sea Crabbers said some crabbers will be going out of business as a result of the cancellation.“This is so unbelievable that this is happening. We have third-generation fishermen who are going to go out of business,” AP news agency quoted Geon as saying.
“Deadliest Catch” may still film this season, as there is one species of snow crab that the crews can catch.
Speaking to KING5, Bri Dwyer, the wife of one of the star’s Deadliest Catch, said that the fishermen found out at the same time as everyone else that the season was canceled.Bri Dwyer, wife of Sean Dwyer, said that the fishermen are allowed to catch, Bairdi, a specific type of snow crab.She said: ‘There’s a small Bairdi season, a little over 2 million pounds and we need to see if it makes sense for our boats.’
Hopefully, the low numbers result from an easily resolvable situation, unlike a deadly disease or the Chinese fishing fleet.
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