Alaskan snow crab fishery, walloped by climate change, may never fully recover

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By Erik Stokstad, Science. 

Excerpt: Billions of snow crabs disappeared from the Bering Sea in 2021 after a marine heat wave cooked the area for several years. Alaskan fishing vessels returned to ports dismayed, and the next year state regulators closed down the lucrative fishery—which had regularly yielded an annual harvest worth $200 million or more—for the first time in history. Many hope the fishery will reopen in the coming years because the water has cooled and young crabs are becoming more plentiful. But the longer term outlook for the fishery is stormy, according to a paper published last week in Nature Climate Change. Snow crabs do worse in years when conditions more closely resemble a boreal, or subarctic, climate, rather than an arctic one. And those conditions are 200 times more likely to occur today than in the mid-1800s, the study indicates.... 

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