[background noise]

Speaker 1: In a major blow to America's seafood industry, Alaska's Department of Fish and Game has canceled the winter snow crab season.

Melissa Harris-Perry: That's right. Those tasty eight-legged crustaceans have been dominating headlines after state officials in Alaska called off snow crab harvesting for the winter. Crabbing is a significant contributor to the state's economy. One state agency estimated that the state's commercial stock of snow crabs was worth more than $101 million, back in 2020, or as Mr. Krabs from SpongeBob Square Pants would put it,

[music]

Cha-ching, Cha-ching, cha-chingaree

Money, oh money, how I love thee

Cha-ching, Cha-chong, Cha-changaroo

Melissa Harris-Perry: What drove state officials to make this decision?

Speaker 2: An estimated 1 billion crabs mysteriously disappeared in just two years.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Team Takeaway is on the case. To help us crack open the hard outer shell and dig the juicy meat out of this so-called mystery, I spoke with Spencer Roberts, an ecologist and science writer.

Spencer Roberts: An Alaskan snow crab is probably bigger than any crab that you've seen alive. They're a species that lives on the bottom of the sea floor in the Bering Sea, at least this population that we're talking about. They grow up in the cold water. They grow up, they start as plankton, tiny little, almost microscopic-

Melissa Harris-Perry: Hi, Spencer. How are you?

Spencer Roberts: -[crosstalk] crazy stages developing-

Melissa Harris-Perry: I'm great. Thanks for having me.

Spencer Roberts: -in the water they eventually settle on the seafloor.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Oh, absolutely [crosstalk].

Spencer Roberts: They grow up, they become huge.

Melissa Harris-Perry: With me now is Spencer Roberts, science journalist and an ecologist. Thanks so much for joining The Takeaway, Spencer.

Spencer Roberts: -and they're a very important animal in the ecology of the Bering Sea, not only as a forager but as a herbivore.

Spencer Roberts: Thanks for having me.

[crosstalk]

Melissa Harris-Perry: Just so we're clear about what we're talking about here, talk with me about-

Melissa Harris-Perry: Can you describe the Alaska snow crab?

[crosstalk]

Melissa Harris-Perry: -the kind of habitat that Alaskan snow crabs would typically need in order to grow up.

Spencer Roberts: There's a very important aspect to this story called the cold pool. The cold pool is essentially the underside of the Arctic sea ice. When the Arctic sea ice forms in the winter, the salt is expelled, ice is all freshwater. The salt is expelled and that water's also very cold. That very saline and very cold water is dense and it sinks to the bottom of the Bering continental shelf and that's what's called the cold pool. In the winter it expands and then in the summer, it contracts. The juvenile snow crabs depend on this cold pool to grow up. It's a great place for them to find food and also a bad place for some of their predators like cod to go for them.

Melissa Harris-Perry: How long does it take for them to go from these tiny plankton to these enormous creatures probably bigger than anyone that I've ever seen?

Melissa Harris-Perry: How is climate change [crosstalk]?

Spencer Roberts: Massively, [crosstalk] so the cold pool in recent years where we've seen record lows in the sea ice, particularly between 2017 [crosstalk] and 2019, 2020. The cold pool has all but collapsed and the cold part of it is really just in the higher latitudes. Evidence shows that the juvenile snow crabs have followed this cold pool as much as they can, but there's also populations that stick around on the Alaska side.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Now talk to me then about how the fishing industry might be exacerbating some of these effects of climate change.

Spencer Roberts: In the headlines, you may have heard something like, "A billion snow crabs have disappeared. It's a mystery. What happened to them?" [crosstalk] I think we need to dig into what exactly happened to [crosstalk]. Some of the theories that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. [crosstalk] are these things like predators like cod being able to penetrate this cold pool, into this [crosstalk] water. That's a good theory. There's an evidence that cods have [crosstalk] but there's also a big problem with it. The cod population is trashed as well. They closed the cod fishery in the Gulf of Alaska just the other year.

They've also brought up the possibility of disease, but one that you don't hear about a lot is fishing pressure. Just as the predators, like cod, have been able to penetrate the warming cold pool, fishing vessels have also been able to enter areas of what were previously frozen over by sea ice in the winter. There is evidence that the rates of fishing mortality have increased as well as the boats have moved into these previously frozen areas.

Melissa Harris-Perry: When you say fishermen, there's different folks, humans who are using these spaces to catch seafood. There are the crabbers, but then there are the trawlers. Can you help me to understand that?

Spencer Roberts: The actual crab fishers use traps. This is a thing that you may have seen on Deadliest Catch. It's a big cage underwater [crosstalk] with bait in it and the crabs will go into the traps and then they can't exit and then they come back and just pull up these ropes.

Trawling is basically dredging a huge net across the sea floor. Dragging it, it pulls up the sediment and typically they are searching for fish species, like sole or halibut that dwell on the sea floor, but they're catching everything else that's on the sea floor as well, including crabs. Data from observers with NOAA in the last few years have shown a spike in the bycatch mortality. That means the species that are caught but aren't the target of the trawl fisheries.

Melissa Harris-Perry: This bycatching, what effect is that having on the crabs?

Spencer Roberts: It definitely has a big one, and there's evidence in the past or anecdotes of bycatch having a huge effect on crab populations. There is an example of the Bristol Bay king crabs in the Bering Sea in the '80s. Essentially what happened was there was an area that was previously closed as a reserve by the Japanese, and then in the middle of the Cold War the US and USSR actually teamed up to go trawl this crab reserve. In a matter of a couple of years, just like we've seen here, the crab populations plummeted. The bycatch rates spikes by over 600% and the King Crabs never recovered in that population. There's definitely a precedent and a reason to be concerned about trawling bycatch on crab populations.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Is it possible to see recovery on the snow crab situation?

Spencer Roberts: I hope so. I think if we really want to earnestly pursue and facilitate that possibility, we need to do everything we can to reduce our pressure on the population. We shouldn't be adding more pressure from fishing at a time when their backs are against the wall with the Arctic sea ice shrinking and the cold pool collapsing.

Melissa Harris-Perry: I'm wondering what the economic effect is going to be for crabbers and more broadly.

Spencer Roberts: There's so many communities in Alaska and in the north that depend on this industry. We're seeing the effects right now. I think we have to provide some compensation for the crabbers, but that's not really a long-term solution. We need to be talking about adjust transitions and job diversification programs and give them opportunities for maybe things like energy development, renewable energy, medical development, education. All these things are really important to invest in and could provide a lot of jobs. [crosstalk]

There are a lot of fishermen who are very supportive of these ideas of job diversification programs, and they're really just following the rules set by the government in terms of the catch quotas. We can't blame the fishermen either here, but it's a very complex system and we got to be thinking about how it's regulated from the top down.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Speaking of complex systems, you were speaking earlier about the cod who eat the crab. What effect is this collapse going to have on the cod?

Spencer Roberts: They're obviously not going to have as much prey. That effect compounds up the food web. The species that rely on cod, like sharks, and then the other predators of snow crab, like halibut, and the species that hunt them like orca. We need a lot, a big healthy population of snow crab to support a medium amount of halibut, to support a few orcas, and that's really all we have left at this point. It's really important to keep the base of this Arctic ecosystem intact.

Melissa Harris-Perry: There's one more predator that I want to ask about, and it's us. Is it now potentially simply-- I can barely make the question. Is it ethical to eat snow crab anymore?

Spencer Roberts: It's not my place to tell people what's ethical, but here's what I would say. There are subsistence fishing communities who have relied on these ecosystems for millennia, and when we as first-world consumers around the world are paying to industrially extract wildlife, those people are the ones that are hurt the most.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Spencer Roberts is a science journalist and ecologist. He's also a little bit of a heartbreaker. Thanks for digging into this for us, Spencer.

Spencer Roberts: Thanks for talking about the crabs.

[background noise]

Copyright © 2024 New York Public Radio. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use at www.wnyc.org for further information.

New York Public Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline, often by contractors. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of New York Public Radio’s programming is the audio record.