Warmer waters in the Bering Sea caused snow crabs to crash. Now, scientists are racing to predict the future of the lucrative fishery
By Warren Cornwall, Science.
Excerpt: ...the recent fate of snow crabs in much of the Bering Sea. An unprecedented underwater heat wave there in 2018 and ’19 set off a chain reaction that led to the disappearance of an estimated 47 billion crabs, one of the largest marine die-offs ever documented. Suddenly, a $150 million fishery mythologized in the Deadliest Catch reality TV show found itself with no catch at all. State regulators for the first time banned Bering Sea snow crab fishing in 2023 and ’24, and the U.S. government declared a federal fishery disaster. The fishery reopened this year. But crabbing boats were only allowed to haul in a tiny fraction of what they had caught previously. The collapse “has had massive impacts,” says Scott Goodman, a fisheries biologist and executive director of the Bering Sea Fisheries Research Foundation, which is funded by the crab industry. ...In the early months of 2018 and again in 2019, however, the winds reversed, blowing from the south part of the time and penning the ice in the north. By the end of those winters, sea ice covered just half of its normal area. “It was a pretty big shock,” says NOAA physical oceanographer Phyllis Stabeno. Even with global warming, she didn’t expect ice coverage to drop that low until the middle of the century....