KODIAK, Alaska — A quiet early October day on the bay in Kodiak, Alaska looks idyllic, but it's a problem for local fishermen.. A huge portion of the crabbing season is canceled with the news that once again, snow crabs will not be caught in the Bering Sea.
"Bering Sea crab fishing has always been a very lucrative business," Prout said."I remember stories from the 70s, even late 60s of guys coming back with a boatload of crab and going to buy gold watches with their earnings, making $100,000 in a month or two."This red flag was raised during the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's annual summer survey. Every year, NOAA spends months collecting data on the Bering Sea crab population.
Recent years show drastic changes. In 2018, there were an estimated 12.2 billion snow crabs in the Baring Sea. In 2019, that number dropped to just shy of 5 billion snow crabs, but it wasn't enough to raise red flags at the time. The summer survey was canceled in 2020 because of the pandemic. Then, in 2021 when the survey returned, those snow crab levels dropped to a little more than one billion total.
"It’s either a mortality event, crabs are not there because they all died. Or our survey didn’t sample them. Whether that’s because they moved either west or north, those were questions we certainly asked in 2021," said Fedeway. Instead, their best guess is that they died, not because of direct impacts from the warm water, but indirect. This could be because the crabs sought out cold pools and crammed together, causing sickness and a fight for food.