Snow crabs what say you?
Small Game
Not sure if I’m buying this. What’s your thoughts? Alaska cancels snow crab season. Odd how our entire food industry has been hit someway or another from Chickens to cattle to Maine lobsters and now snow crab. Either very odd or very convenient. Every time I watched Deadliest Catch those Bering seas looked mighty damn cold!
Yeah Alaska F&G is in cahoots with Bill Gates to get everybody eating lab foods
Well that went off the rails in like 30 seconds.
I always felt Sig was good, but dayummmmm…..he must’ve been sandbagging.
lol.
you know how scientists make a big deal about a 1deg average increase and everyone blows it off? Whelp 1 deg average makes a difference. Especially when it happens every few decades. Leading theory I saw is they went off the shelf into very deep/colder water. Presumably unable to climb back up said shelf.
I love the fresh conspiracy takes though. I mean i don't. It's just sad.
Hmmm...global illuminati sabotaging snow crab populations or man-made climate alarmist mocking that theory. I can't decide which side of this thread is the pot vs the kettle.
Snow crabs what say you?
I’d shoot for the middle of the middle!! Maybe with my recurve. Figure it’s appropriate since I shoot off the shelf with it!!
No season for King crab last year, and now no Opilios? That's pretty much going to decimate the crab fleet.
Same thing happened to the Chum salmon run here in the Skagit river. Over a two year period the run went from robust to just busted. Don't know if it's what caused it, but the tribes were gillnetting the crap out of them, selling the eggs to Asian markets and just leaving the fish to rot.
Ya mike, you can kiss probably 70% of the fleet good bye… seems high but damn possible
Guess it's back to beef on the Wednesday night Golden Corral buffet. If that REALLY is beef. ;-)
It sounds like Alaska G&F has been setting quotas for crabbers since 1976, based on population surveys conducted in the summers every year. Why would they suddenly turn corrupt and misrepresent the survey results? Who would possibly benefit from that?
It sucks for the crabbers, but this sounds like nothing more than good wildlife conservation and management, to me. I regularly watch The Deadliest Catch, and it does seem like in recent years they've struggled to meet their quotas, even though the quotas have gotten smaller. So, I do believe something has caused the crab population to decline. Hopefully it's just a cyclical thing and the populations will return.
Matt
Matt Matt, you’re making way too much sense. There no place here for that.
Crab COVID! They’re hiding from all the mask/vax mandates.
Yup, covid for sure -- once they dropped off that shelf, they have to quarantine for 6 months.
It's obviously Trumps fault
Fisheries seem to be fragile environments that biologist don't fully understand, and may never. I recall when the rainbow trout populations in many western rivers suddenly declined drastically several years ago. The biologists blamed it on Whirling Disease from a microscopic parasite. Nothing that I'm aware of was ever done to combat the parasite. Eventually the rainbows began making a comeback. Populations of native rainbows and reproductive rates still aren't what they used to be, but it is improving.
If you talk to any old-timer fisherman in the S. Florida Keys you know that their fishery is a mere shadow of what it once was. Popular sport fish, like bonefish, permit, and tarpon were once plentiful. The bonefish were the first to disappear. Then the size and numbers of permit started declining. The tarpon proved to be a little more hearty, but they declined as well. Thru conservation and management efforts, like catch and release regulations and water quality improvements, those species have slowly began making a comeback.
I'm sure there are similar stories in fisheries all over the world. Hopefully, the Alaskan crab fisheries experience a similar comeback. Sometimes Mother Nature just has to do her thing.
Matt
Meanwhile the Russians are wide open
Places that import Russian crab are going gangbusters. The prices are low. We don't import Russian crab due to Ukraine.
Russia is cutting back on some fisheries now due to illegal crabbing hurting the resource (their story).
Is it possible the population is fine but they are currently elsewhere? Serious question as I do not know what methods they use to locate crabs and how do they count them?
Russia turned 50% of their crab fishing quotas into an auction to the highest bidders in 2019. The winners of the auctions were required to order a crab-fishing vessel to be built by a Russian shipyard. One large company won over 1/3 of the quotas. I doubt conservation and management of their crab resource is their primary concern.
Matt
Aren’t the quotas determined by last year’s catch? Maybe the fisherman had a bad year but the crab are just fine.
In Alaska, each crab boat gets *shares* of the total allowable catch based on their catch history. The total allowable catch is based on summer population surveys. So, for example, if the total allowable catch is 100 tons, and a boat has 1% shares, that boat can catch 1 ton of crab. If the total allowable catch is 10 tons, that boat can only catch 1/10 of a ton. If the total allowable catch is 0 tons, the boat captains and deck hands have to find work elsewhere.
Matt
Mark they do summer survey study’s that determine the quota for the year.
Is it possible the population is fine but they are currently elsewhere? Serious question as I do not know what methods they use to locate crabs and how do they count them?
It’s been a trend is my guess.
Spike78, they do a lot of commercial stone and blue crab fishing around where we vacation in Sanibel every year. We also set traps for baby blue and pass crabs to use for fishing bait. Once you figure out the type of water, bottom structure, temp, depth, etc...you can usually catch them in the same spots every year. They also "flush" with the hill tides at certain times of year. You can scoop them out of the water with long nets from a boat when they are flushing. So they aren't exactly hard to find or difficult to study the populations down there. I suspect it's the same in the Alaskan fisheries, only on a larger/deeper scale.
I do know that only male crabs of most species can be harvested. Females have be released. I think the focus of the quota surveys is on mature female crabs, which are an indication of future reproduction rates and overall populations.
Matt
I wonder which group will be the one to claim that filming Deadliest Catch in the first place, is what caused it?
I doubt Deadliest Catch inspired too many new crabbers. Just like Gold Rush. They are both brutal ways to make a living, that most don’t have the fortitude or resources to pursue. If anyone blames DC for this, they are brain dead.
Matt
They will find something else to fish for. They have to in order to survive. The ones that can’t will be gone. Bairdi, blue king, cod, halibut, tendering, etc. the die hards will find a way. Hopefully….
My take, man has destroyed everything we touch. We are locusts! Alaska from the US perspective and even globally is the last of it and yet we have milked it dry and then some. The salmon situation is a slap in the face to conservation and the world as a whole.
Sad story
Mankind aren't locusts, but mankind's glut behavior is. Moderation in all things, including wealth...
Poaching from foreign vessels doesn't help....
On deadliest catch they had an episode where Russian trawlers were fishing in US waters. Trawlers, aka drag boats have massive nets that drag across the bottom catching of destroying everything in their path. I lived near Monterey bay for 21 years. For decades there were drag boats fishing there. Dungeness crabs were a rare find back then. No one fished for them because there were hardly any there. They finally banned that type of fishing. Now the crabs are back. I went out fishing with a friend. His crab traps were packed with legal crabs. If those trawlers in Alaska go through a biomass of crabs they could get tons in one net.
The publicizing of this story was a conspiracy to encourage the promotion of conspiracy theories. It worked.
One of these Russian boats can catch 150-200 tons a day. Whatever is in the way gets killed and leaves the bottom looking like it’s been plowed. Then there’s the issue of tons of too small fish that die and are shoveled overboard. These giant factory boats catch and process fish 24 hours a day. They should be banned.
And the culprit is…global warming! Because of global warming the crabs disappeared suddenly. Because global warming is not a gradual change. It happens over night!
From now on, if I get skunked on a fishing or hunting trip, I’ll simply blame climate change.
I don’t know come here from sic ‘em about snow crabs but things aren’t always as the seem (or officially represented). We had a pretyy big fish kill on a 3,000 acre local lake a year or two ago and the Texas Department of Wildlife represented it to be due to a golden algae bloom when they had been spraying the hell out of all the vegetation in the upper end of the lake for two weeks prior. Coinsidence ? Maybe, but I doubt it.
Dry creek that sounds more plausible then climate change. They basically said it was like a 3 degree temp difference. Not sure if I buy that.
The climate has always been in a state of change, and that will continue with or without man. Do we play a role ? Sure we do, just the way it is. As far as the harvest, there are plenty of other things to eat besides snow crab.
