The Department of Game and Fish in Alaska has canceled the snow crab season for the first time. The reason is that a billion shoals of snow crabs have disappeared from the Bering Sea in just two years. Shellfish is an expensive delicacy, and has been a reliable source of income for American fisheries for several decades. Now the population has shrunk by 90%, and crab has disappeared from many restaurant menus. Norwegian researchers hold up a king crab. Photo: Marit Rein – Did they run north to cool the water, Gabriel Prout asks CBS. He runs a fishery on Kodiak Island and has been very dependent on the snow crab population. – Have they crossed the border completely? Or gone off the edge of the continental shelf, over the Bering Sea? A researcher at the Ministry of Alaska, Ben Daly, believes it is obvious that climate change has caused the king crab to flee. – We have seen warm temperatures in the Bering Sea in the last couple of years, and we see an answer to this in the species that are adapted to cold water, he says to CBS newspaper. Daly says you can look at the snow crab as “the canary in the coal mine”, as it can be a signal that several species will disappear if the sea continues to get warmer. Snow crab The snow crab is found in the Bering Sea, along the east coast of Canada and the west coast of Greenland. It lives on soft bottoms and is a more arctic species than the king crab – it thrives in cold bodies of water. The diet consists mostly of benthic animals such as small clams, brushfish and starfish. The snow crab has a final molt in connection with sexual maturation at 5-7 years of age. After this, it does not grow any more and will live for a maximum of about five more years. Males are significantly larger than females and weigh up to two kilograms. Only male crabs are fished for, and in the areas mentioned above there is a minimum size of 95 – 100 mm carapace width. Source: Framsenteret Regarded as a gold mine Snow crab was described five years ago as the next Norwegian gold mine, when fishing was first regulated in talks with Russia. Last year, Norwegian companies spent NOK 804 million on exports of this crab alone. Ironically, it was the Americans who imported the most Norwegian snow crabs in 2021, for NOK 142 million, according to Norway’s Seafood Council. Norwegian boats have already fished up this year’s quota of more than 6,700 tonnes. So far the income is lower, at NOK 604 million. This number is still expected to rise as the frozen crabs are sold. – It is positive for Norwegian snow crab fishing that Alaska has done this, even though they of course have much larger quotas than we have here. This is according to researcher Forskar Ann Merete Hjelseth at the Institute of Marine Research. She believes that already in the 90s, something had happened that caused the crab to migrate west. – It has certainly been a tiny temperature week that has made a change, so that the snow crab suddenly just tumbles into the Barents Sea. – It is probably climate change that is the explanatory parameter here. But to what extent it will affect the snow crab it is difficult to say yet, as it is relatively new in the Barents Sea and on the Norwegian shelf. A Norwegian survey in 2017 was carried out with a video rig that was towed along the seabed. Will not change ecosystem at first After the first snow crab was found on Svalbard in 2011, researchers feared the damage it could do to the vulnerable wildlife. The health department says that the crabs that have been found more than ten years later have also been isolated observations. She believes it is likely that the crab range will spread north and east in the Barents Sea over time, and that the density around Svalbard will increase with this. Nevertheless, she says that they do not have any specific targets for the stock, and calculates this based on how much is caught. This is regulated by quotas, and mostly happens out in the deep. The Institute of Marine Research already warned about the rising snow crab population near Svalbard in 2014. Photo: Terje Bendiksby / NTB The snow crab is somewhat smaller than the king crab, also considered invasive. Nevertheless, because they are smaller, it takes many to cause damage to the ecosystems on the seabed. Hjelset does not believe that the entire billion that has disappeared from the Bering Sea is on its way to us. – The Bering Strait is where the mouth into the Arctic Ocean is, if you look at it in a big way. They may have migrated into the East Siberian Sea and the Chukchi Sea, then. If the billion crabs have moved north and west, the East Siberian Sea and the Chukchi Sea are the first two stations on the way. In that case, it is Russian fishermen who get the benefit of the loss from the American side, and not Norwegians at all.Even now, the Russian fishing quota for the snow crab is twice as large as the Norwegian one, according to the Norwegian Institute of Marine Research.
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