Climate change and a continually warming world has done a lot of damage and made survival more difficult for several species. In this case, it has adversely affected the Alaskan Snow Crabs and that aspect of the fishing industry. Here's the story from SCIENCE.
Alaskan snow crab fishery, walloped by climate change, may never fully recover
27 Aug 20245:30 PM ETByErik Stokstad, SCIENCE
Billions of snow crabs disappeared from the Bering Sea in 2021 after a marine heat wave cooked the area for several years. Alaskan fishing vessels returned to ports dismayed, and the next year state regulators closed down the lucrative fishery—which had regularly yielded an annual harvest worth $200 million or more—for the first time in history.
Many hope the fishery will reopen in the coming years because the water has cooled and young crabs are becoming more plentiful. But the longer term outlook for the fishery is stormy, according to a paper published last week in Nature Climate Change. Snow crabs do worse in years when conditions more closely resemble a boreal, or subarctic, climate, rather than an arctic one. And those conditions are 200 times more likely to occur today than in the mid-1800s, the study indicates. “I don't want to use the word doom, but I think there’s a very good chance that snow crabs are not going to recover to the levels that we’ve seen historically,” says Franz Mueter, a fisheries scientist at the University of Alaska Fairbanks who wasn’t involved in the research.
Snow crabs (Chionoecetes opilio)—named for the way their red flesh turns bright white when cooked—live in many parts of the Arctic Ocean and in some places farther south. In the Bering Sea, they only grow big enough for harvesting at the southern end of their range, on the margin of seasonal winter ice. Hunting anything that moves on the sandy sea floor, they thrive in water that is just a few degrees Celsius. That preference proved calamitous when the bottom water began to hit record temperatures in 2018, causing populations to decline by more than 90%.
The economic harm to fishing communities has been severe. “The bottom dropped out,” says Jamie Goen, who leads the trade group Alaska Bering Sea Crabbers. She expects only half of the 60-vessel fleet to eventually resume fishing. “We are still in the middle of a crisis.”
The crash stunned many scientists as well, given that Alaskan fisheries are some of the most productive, best studied, and well managed in the world. “If it can happen in the Bering Sea,” says Arani Chandrapavan, a fisheries scientist at the Western Australian Department of Fisheries, “then it can happen anywhere.”
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