Alaskan officials have canceled the upcoming snow crab season, due to population decline across the Bering Sea.
The fall Bristol Bay red king crab harvest would not happen, while the winter harvest of smaller snow crab has also been canceled for the first time.
The causes of the population collapse are being researched but likely include increased predation and stresses from warmer water, which the US Environmental Protection Agency said might have prompted the crabs to shift away from coasts.
Photo: Bloomberg
“In the Bering Sea, Alaska pollock, snow crab and Pacific halibut have generally shifted away from the coast since the early 1980s... They have also moved northward by an average of 19 miles,” the federal agency said.
The Alaska closures reflect conservation concerns about both crab species following bleak summer population surveys. The decisions to shut down the harvests came after days of discussions among Alaska state biologists and senior officials, who faced crabbers’ pleas for at least small takes to be allowed.
“These are truly unprecedented and troubling times for Alaska’s iconic crab fisheries and for the hard-working fishermen and communities that depend on them,” said Jamie Goen, executive director of Alaska Bering Sea Crabbers, a trade association.
“Second and third-generation crab-fishing families will go out of business due to the lack of meaningful protections by decisionmakers to help crab stocks recover,” she added.
The Alaska Department of Fish and Game (ADF&G) released a statement saying that “management of Bering Sea snow crab must now focus on conservation and rebuilding given the conditions of the stock.”
Bering Sea snow crab populations declined after a 2019 warming that scrambled the broader marine ecosystem. Last year’s snow crab harvest of 2.54 million kilograms was the smallest in more than 40 years.
Within the limits of a federal management plan, Alaska determines how many crab are caught each year.
A scientific model of the snow crab population reviewed by the federal North Pacific Fishery Management Council last week indicated there might have been enough this year for a small harvest.
However, Ben Daly, an ADF&G research coordinator, said the model has struggled to account for the dramatic population decline after the 2019 warming, and state officials were concerned it might not be accurate.
“We have extreme conservation concerns about the population. We have serious doubts about the model,” Daly told the Associated Press.
POLITICAL PRISONERS VS DEPORTEES: Venezuela’s prosecutor’s office slammed the call by El Salvador’s leader, accusing him of crimes against humanity Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele on Sunday proposed carrying out a prisoner swap with Venezuela, suggesting he would exchange Venezuelan deportees from the US his government has kept imprisoned for what he called “political prisoners” in Venezuela. In a post on X, directed at Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, Bukele listed off a number of family members of high-level opposition figures in Venezuela, journalists and activists detained during the South American government’s electoral crackdown last year. “The only reason they are imprisoned is for having opposed you and your electoral fraud,” he wrote to Maduro. “However, I want to propose a humanitarian agreement that
ECONOMIC WORRIES: The ruling PAP faces voters amid concerns that the city-state faces the possibility of a recession and job losses amid Washington’s tariffs Singapore yesterday finalized contestants for its general election on Saturday next week, with the ruling People’s Action Party (PAP) fielding 32 new candidates in the biggest refresh of the party that has ruled the city-state since independence in 1965. The move follows a pledge by Singaporean Prime Minister Lawrence Wong (黃循財), who took office last year and assumed the PAP leadership, to “bring in new blood, new ideas and new energy” to steer the country of 6 million people. His latest shake-up beats that of predecessors Lee Hsien Loong (李顯龍) and Goh Chok Tong (吳作棟), who replaced 24 and 11 politicians respectively
Archeologists in Peru on Thursday said they found the 5,000-year-old remains of a noblewoman at the sacred city of Caral, revealing the important role played by women in the oldest center of civilization in the Americas. “What has been discovered corresponds to a woman who apparently had elevated status, an elite woman,” archeologist David Palomino said. The mummy was found in Aspero, a sacred site within the city of Caral that was a garbage dump for more than 30 years until becoming an archeological site in the 1990s. Palomino said the carefully preserved remains, dating to 3,000BC, contained skin, part of the
Young women standing idly around a park in Tokyo’s west suggest that a giant statue of Godzilla is not the only attraction for a record number of foreign tourists. Their faces lit by the cold glow of their phones, the women lining Okubo Park are evidence that sex tourism has developed as a dark flipside to the bustling Kabukicho nightlife district. Increasing numbers of foreign men are flocking to the area after seeing videos on social media. One of the women said that the area near Kabukicho, where Godzilla rumbles and belches smoke atop a cinema, has become a “real
RSS