State sets much larger harvest guideline for Southeast golden king crab

The commercial tanner crab and golden king crab season in Southeast opens at noon Feb 17.

A change this year will require golden king crab fishermen to call in to the Department of Fish and Game every day to report which management area they plan to fish, to help fisheries staff better anticipate and manage the harvest.

The department announced the golden king crab guideline harvest level in southern Southeast, Registration Area A, at 272,500 pounds, with specific areas seeing notable changes. The number is almost three times the size of last year’s guideline harvest, with most of the increase in a single portion of the region.

The increase is the result of meetings between the fishing industry and state fisheries management. Last year, golden king crab abundance in the East Central portion of Area A, around Kupreanof and Mitkof islands, and the waters west of Zarembo Island, was dramatically underestimated. The 2023 numbers suggested that the fishery could support a much larger harvest.

The department has set the guideline harvest level for the East Central portion at 150,000 pounds, more than 10 times the 2023 pre-season number.

A funding cut years ago ended the state’s golden king crab onboard observer program, where observers used to go out with fishermen, sew up the escape rings of pots — which allow immature and female crabs to escape from the pot and not be caught in the harvest — and measure how many juveniles got caught when the pot was hauled back in.

The program helped survey, measure and check stock health. Now, two projects are in progress to provide improved data.

Fishermen have reported seeing juveniles, but without an official survey the area count is unclear. The objective of one new project is to get a better idea of where the juvenile grounds are by allowing up to five volunteer vessels to sew up the escape rings of five golden king crab pots, count how many male and female juveniles they catch, and record that data in a logbook.

The other project will take place after an area is closed, when one vessel sets 10 sewn-closed pots in high-density juvenile golden king crab areas, then later returns with a Department of Fish and Game employee, or observer, to retrieve the pots and measure the crab to get a better idea of the shellfish size in that area.

Adam Messmer, the department’s lead shellfish biologist in Southeast, said the new monitoring programs are in their infancy and would take “multiple years of data to figure out whether that population is going up or down. … But, like any project, you have to start somewhere.”