Snow crab stocks in Alaska’s Bering Sea, which crashed a few years ago, have recovered enough to allow a modest harvest starting in mid-October.
The Alaska Department of Fish and Game on Oct. 6 announced that fishers will be allowed to harvest 9.3 million pounds of Bering Sea snow crab from Oct. 15 to May. The harvest cap is about twice the 4.72 million pounds allowed in the past season, which followed an unprecedented two-year period of closed harvests.
The Bering Sea snow crab harvest closures came after catastrophic losses that scientists have attributed to an intense, multiyear marine heatwave that started in 2018.
The 9.3-million-pound total harvest cap set for the coming season is much smaller than past harvests that, at their peak, reached hundreds of millions of pounds in the early 1990s.
The harvest cap was set by the state based on biological parameters approved by the North Pacific Fishery Management Council. Bering Sea crab harvests are co-managed by the state and federal governments.
The Department of Fish and Game also announced a Bristol Bay red king crab harvest cap of 2.68 million pounds, up slightly from the 2.31-million-pound allowable catch set last year. The red king crab harvest will run from Oct. 15 to Jan. 15, the department said.
Like snow crab, Bristol Bay red king crab, known for their huge size and the high market prices they fetch, suffered a recent crash. Harvests were closed from 2021 to 2023; it was the first two-year stretch without a Bristol Bay red king crab harvest.
There will also be an increase allowed in the harvest of Bering Sea tanner crab, a species related to snow crab but less sensitive to heat. The department announced a combined 11.25-million-pound harvest cap spread across western and eastern areas of the Bering Sea. That is nearly twice the allowable Bering Sea tanner crab catch the department set last year.
The increased harvest limits follow scientific surveys that found increases among all three types of crab typically harvested in the Bering Sea.
“It’s getting better. It’s a slow and steady increase here,” Katie Palof, an Alaska Department of Fish and Game researcher, told the North Pacific Fishery Management Council Oct. 6.
For harvesters, the signs are welcome, said Cory Lescher of Alaska Bering Sea Crabbers, an industry group of independent harvesters.
“As crab harvesters and industry, we’re really encouraged by the positive signals that we saw come out of the bottom trawl survey with regards to crab, particularly for snow crab,” Lescher told the council. “We’re still concerned that all the stocks are low, but we’re seeing at least a step in the right direction with some of these results that we saw.”
While short-term signs are encouraging, there are signs of potential long-term problems.
For Bristol Bay red king crab, there have been no jumps in the population of immature crabs since 2015, Palof said. That raises concerns about future population sizes, she said.
There are concerning signs for king crab in the Bristol Bay marine environment as well, Palof said. More wind meant poorer feeding conditions for larvae, she said. Waters were warmer than in the past four years, and there are continued corrosive conditions at depth with lower pH levels that affect shell growth.
For snow crab and tanner crab, there are concerns about the shrinking size of adult males, as the industry prefers to harvest big adult male crabs. Unlike king crab and some other shellfish species, which continue growing and replacing their shells throughout their lifetimes, snow crab and tanner crab have limits to their growth.
“Once they molt to maturity, they stop growing,” Palof said.
Also for snow crab, there is a continuing threat of new marine heatwaves like the 2018-2019 event that scientists blame for the recent crash.
Mark Stichert, the Alaska Department of Fish and Game’s Kodiak-based groundfish and shellfish management coordinator, said the possibility of future heatwaves could factor into future harvest decisions.
“We do know that snow crab, as their name implies, like cold water. Absences of cold water, their stock does not do well,” he said.
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