Where Have All the Snow Crabs Gone?
When the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration announced the first-ever cancellation of the Bering Sea snow crab season in October—and extended the closure of the king crab fishery—explanations were thin. Headlines relayed what the government had gathered: Nearly 11 billion crabs had, effectively, disappeared. The cause remained an open case, albeit with a prime suspect: climate change.
But climate doesn’t tell the whole story. Nautilus interviewed marine scientists, fishermen, former and current government officials, from Alaska to D.C., whose expertise and testimonies indicate there’s another force at play: fishing. Yet like all good mysteries, the story goes even deeper. It begins with a diver and a camera.
It was September 1993 at the bottom of the Gulf of Alaska. As he descended and the seafloor came into view, Braxton Dew witnessed a phenomenon few others had ever seen: a mountain of king crabs. There were some 9,000 of them, towering above his head once he reached the seabed. He checked the depth gauge: 75 feet. He captured a photograph.
Dew would log 943 dives observing the crabs during his 25-year tenure as a marine biologist at NOAA, where he studied their complex social systems, cooperative foraging techniques, and unique podding behavior: when king crabs come together in daytime to rest in spherical or dome-shaped formations before foraging in a herd at night.
In 1996, Dew used the photo to help demonstrate to NOAA administrators that the survey methods they used to estimate adult . It was too easy to pull the sampling net through an aggregation and extrapolate that highly localized density to an entire region. If this occurred, the population estimates used by government managers
