In the short term, Alaska crab fishers and the communities that depend on them will get a slight reprieve from the disastrous conditions they have endured for the past two years, with harvests for iconic red king crab to open on Sunday.
In the long term, the future for Bering Sea crab and the people who depend on it is clouded by environmental and economic upheaval.
The decision by the Alaska Department of Fish and Game to open harvests of Bristol Bay red king crab after an unprecedented two-year shutdown was a close call, a state biologist told industry members during a meeting on Thursday.
Red king crab are the largest of the commercially harvested crab species, and their meat is prized as a delicacy.
The department’s decision to allow a small harvest, announced on Oct. 6, was based on preseason surveys by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Marine Fisheries Service.
Biologist Mark Stichert said the surveys suggest that the crash that forced two years of closure in the Bristol Bay red king crab fishery, the major Alaska source for that highly prized seafood species, has bottomed out.
“The decline has stopped. But whether or not we’re seeing a rebound in the biomass is hard to say,” Stichert said during the Thursday briefing. He is the Department of Fish and Game’s Kodiak-based groundfish and shellfish fisheries management coordinator.
The allowable harvest that opened on Sunday, as set by the state, is 2.15 million pounds, a little less than the 2.6 million pounds allocated for harvest in the 2020-21 season, the last time Bristol Bay red king crab was fished. It is considerably lower than in past years; in the 2016-17 season, for example, the total allowable harvest was nearly 8.47 million pounds. Those totals were dwarfed by the annual harvests four decades ago, which peaked in 1980 at nearly 130 million pounds.
The conclusion that crab numbers are now adequate to support a Bristol Bay area harvest hangs on a slender thread — the discovery of 382 adult female crabs in the preseason surveys, 121 more than were pulled up in last year’s surveys, Stichert said. The bulk of the adult females found this year were in a single spot, he said.