Crab crash controversy: did overfishing doom Alaska's king of crabs?

AuthorSchneider, Doug

The late 1970s and early 1980s were heady days for red king crab fishermen plumbing the waters of Bristol Bay. A lucky few became instant millionaires, thanks to a seemingly inexhaustible supply of the state's largest and most valuable crustacean.

At its peak in 1980, the bay's red king crab harvest was worth more than $115 million, second only to the combined value of all five species of salmon harvested in the state at the time.

But just two years later, the crab boom was bust. With just 3 million pounds caught, fishing was closed. Hundreds of jobs were lost, fishermen declared bankruptcy, and communities like Unalaska and Kodiak would be forever changed.

In the decades since, albeit with sparse evidence, scientists have almost universally blamed changed ocean conditions for the crab's demise. Warmer ocean temperatures, the conventional wisdom goes, created a new ecosystem regime in the Bering Sea, one dominated by huge populations of cod, pollock and flatfish. Crab stocks were less productive in the warmer water, and moved out of their traditional ranges. All the while, these new schools of predatory fish feasted on crab. Disease also took a toll, scientists believe. Against this backdrop, commercial fishing was merely a sideshow. But not everyone has bought into the conventional wisdom.

"Rubbish," said Braxton Dew, a crab researcher with the National Marine Fisheries Service in Seattle. "If people begin to understand that it was man's fishing--as opposed to nature--that caused the red king crab collapse, then they may be more judicious in how they manage the stock. It's a problem of realizing that we may have been at fault."

Dew, together with NMFS colleague Robert McConnaughey, believes overfishing drove Bristol Bay's red king crab to near extinction. Their research was published last year in Ecological Applications, a peer-reviewed scientific journal of the Ecological Society of America. Not surprisingly, Dew and McConnanghey's research had drawn sharp criticism from their peers.

RED BAGS IN THE POT SANCTUARY

Dew and McConnaughey believe the beginning of the end for Bristol Bay's red king crab came with passage of the 1976 Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act. The act Americanized Alaska's fisheries to 200 miles offshore, and gave birth to the massive U.S. groundfish industry, today worth more than $2 billion a year.

Dew said the act opened a gigantic swath southeast of Bristol Bay, called the pot sanctuary, to bottom trawling.

A region slightly larger than West Virginia, the pot sanctuary had been largely off-limits to trawling since the Japanese established it in 1959. Dew said Japanese research indicated...

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