Billions of snow crabs in the east Bering Sea died between 2018 and 2021. Scientists now believe they know why.
Updated: 15 minutes agoThe crew of the Pinnacle sort crab on Saturday, Jan. 22, 2022 in the Bering Sea southwest of St. Matthew Island.
For that particular year, those scientists estimated 11 billion crabs were living, crawling, eating and reproducing in the frigid waters below, said Cody Szuwalski, a fishery biologist at NOAA. They had never seen such high numbers.That year’s survey showed only about 1 billion crabs remaining. If the crustaceans were few, so were the theories. “Were they overfished?” Szuwalski asked, considering the options.
First, Szuwalski said high numbers of snow crabs — like the record peak in 2018 — put the whole population at greater risk, particularly because there were greater numbers of mature crabs. More recent heat waves have neither reached as far north nor as deep and likely haven’t cut into crab populations nearly as much, Leising said.No two marine heat waves are exactly alike, Leising said, so their influence on the ecosystems they hit will differ.
“We knew we were in deep doo doo,” said Benjamin Daly, a research coordinator with Alaska’s Department of Fish and Game. “We were in the midst of a population collapse.”
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