In recent years, scientists noticed that billions of snow crabs have disappeared from the waters around Alaska, and they now claim to know why. According to scientists, the rising ocean temperatures have caused the snow crabs to starve to death.
The findings were made public just days after the Alaska Department of Fish and Game canceled the crab harvest season for the second time in a row, claiming a rising number of missing crabs from the Bering Sea.
The study, published on Thursday (Oct 19) by scientists at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), discovered a substantial link between the disappearance of snow crabs, which started disappearing in 2021 as per the surveys, and recent marine heat waves in the eastern Bering Sea.
“When I received the 2021 data from the survey for the first time, my mind was just blown,” stated Cody Szuwalski, lead author of the study and fishery biologist at NOAA. “Everybody was just kind of hoping and praying that that was an error in the survey and that next year you would see more crabs,” she added.
“And then in 2022, it was more of a resignation that this is going to be a long road,” said Szuwalski, while speaking to CNN.
Is overfishing to blame for the extinction of snow crabs?
For the first time, the US snow crab fishery in Alaska was closed in 2022. According to the catchers, overfishing has caused the population of snow crabs to fall; nevertheless, “overfished” is a technical term that, according to specialists, fails to explain the collapse.
“The big take home for me from the paper, and just the whole experience in general, is that historically, fishery scientists had been very worried about overfishing — this has been our white whale and in a lot of places we solved that with management,” said Szuwalski. “But climate change is throwing a wrench into our plans, our models, and our management systems,” she added.
The experts looked into what could have caused the snow crabs to disappear in 2020 and came up with two possibilities: the snow crabs either relocated or perished.
Szuwalski stated that they explored north of the Bering Sea, deeper levels of the oceans, and west toward Russian waters, and ” ultimately concluded that it was unlikely that the crabs moved, and that the mortality event is probably a big driver.”
Population density and warmer temperatures were found to be strongly associated with greater mortality rates among grown crabs in the study.