Bering Sea snow crab, with two specimens seen in this undated photo, support an iconic Alaska seafood harvest, but a crash in population triggered two consecuctive years of closure, starting in 2022. There are now enough snow crab of commercial size to support a harvest this winter, though it will be small. (Photo provided by National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration)
After a two-year hiatus forced by low stocks, the Bering Sea snow crab harvest is back on.
The decision to reopen the harvest, announced on Oct. 4 by the Alaska Department of Fish and Game, is based on signs of recovery in the crab populations. The official harvest opening was Tuesday.
Signs of recovery are modest, and so is the allowable catch. The harvest is limited to 4.72 million pounds, a level that is a far cry from the 45-million-pound quota used in the 2020-21 season and similarly large quotas in earlier years.
This season’s total allowable catch is the smallest in the history of the fishery, said Mark Stichert, the Alaska Department of Fish and Game’s Kodiak-based management coordinator for groundfish and shellfish harvests.
The department sets catch limits based on information gleaned by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Marine Fisheries Service.
As Stichert describes it, the department’s decision to allow a “small, conservative fishery” for snow crab was the product of a careful balancing act.
The extreme warming of 2018 through 2020, which caused the snow crab population to crash, is now over, and there are signs of resiliency and recovery, he said.
“We’re seeing a good signal. There’s a lot of small crab in the ocean right now for snow crab,” he said.
A “welcomed surprise,” Stichert said, was the greater-than-expected number of larger and more mature snow crab revealed by surveys. Snow crab fishers focus on males that are at least 4 inches across, and there are enough of those to support some harvesting this winter, he said.
At the same time, there is a need to preserve those big animals to encourage reproduction while letting the smaller crab continue to develop, he said. “We’ve been focusing on really making sure that we leave enough of those large males in the water because we think those are the dominant breeders in the population,” he said.
There is more positive news for Bering Sea crab fishers, at least in the short term.
The department increased the harvest limit for Bristol Bay red king crab, an iconic Alaska shellfish known for its large size and premium market prices, from last season’s minimal level. This year’s harvest limit for red king crab from that part of the Bering Sea was set by the state at 2.31 million pounds, up from last year’s 2.15-million-pound quota.
That follows an unprecedented two-year harvest closure in the winters of 2021-2022 and 2022-2023.
Biologists have not seen a rebound in the stock, but there appears to be no more decline, Stichert said. Bering Sea red king crab, after past years of volatility, appear to have stabilized at levels that are lower than in the past but that can still support some harvesting, Stichert said.
A blackboard at New Sagaya City Market in downtown Anchorage posts prices for crab and other fish on Dec. 1, 2023. A smaller sign celebrates last year’s resumption of the red king crab harvest after a two-year closure. Red king crab, known for their huge sizes, are iconic Alaska seafood that can fetch high prices. (Photo by Yereth Rosen/Alaska Beacon)
This year’ total allowable red king crab catch is still far below those of past years, he added.
“Small fisheries or fisheries that are smaller in terms of exploitation than historical, they yield stability, but certainly don’t seem to contribute to any further declines,” he said. “And so we’re taking a sort of a steady, steady-as-it goes approach for red king crab, offering up small fisheries at exploitation rates that are about half or less than what we have historically set them at.”
Red king crab can grow huge, with legs stretching out to as much as 5 feet and bodies that can weigh 24 pounds.
With the recently announced 4.5-million-pound quota for tanner crab, a species related to snow crab, Bering Sea fishers will now be able to harvest all three species consecutively again after a yearslong break, making their efforts more economically efficient, Stichert said.
When they are able to do so, fishers usually harvest red king crab at the start of the season, then move to tanner crab and then, after the start of the new year, to snow crab, he said.
For the fishing industry, the announced harvest quotas, though small, came as a relief after consecutive years of closure.
“While these stocks still face challenges, crabbers are excited to get back to the fishing grounds and sustainably harvest these iconic Alaskan species,” Alaska Bering Sea Crabbers, an industry group, said in a Facebook post.
In the longer term, there is a lot of uncertainty about the crab populations.
Scientists have warned the marine heat waves that devastated fish stocks in recent years were not “lightning strikes” but will likely become more frequent and possibly more intense in the future, thanks to climate change, Stichert said. That makes harvest management more complicated, he said.
“It is challenging enough just trying to figure out how many crab are in the water today, versus making projection estimates of the future and then what to do about that,” he said.
Red king crab in the Bering Sea are also being affected by a changing environment.
The concentration of Bristol Bay red king crab appears to have shifted northward, with much of the population now outside of the protective zone where bottom trawling is prohibited, according to newly published research by Kodiak-based scientists with NOAA’s Alaska Fisheries Science Center.
The Bristol Bay Red King Crab Savings Area, a zone established in the 1990s that stretches across 4,000 square nautical miles, may no longer have the correct geographic parameters, according to the findings. The savings area was designated a zone where bottom trawling is prohibited so that developing crabs can be protected, especially when they are in their vulnerable molt phase, in which they are shedding old shells to allow new shells to grow and harden.
Trawl gear that sweeps the seafloor to catch flatfish and other bottom-dwelling species can entangle or crush the developing crab or the gear can damage the habitat on which they depend.
The new study suggests that the “decades-old static closure areas” might have to be reevaluated.
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