One Crab, Two Crab, Snow Crab, Blue Crab by Amelia Rehrig


If you’ve ever been to Maryland there’s one staple you’ll see everywhere: the blue crab. The blue crab

hibernates in the Chesapeake Bay, that big body of water separating the Eastern Shore from Maryland’s

mainland, where they remain throughout the winter and fatten up, ripe for hungry seafood fanatics in the

summer months. As a Maryland native, I never really understood the hype, but I know that the blue crab is

culturally and economically ingrained into my state. 

I recently learned of another crustation vital to an American state: the snow crab. Snow crabs reside in the Bering Sea off the coast of Alaska where they burrow in the soft muddy sea floor. The crabs have thrived in the Bering Sea for centuries, as they prefer the arctic ice cold waters of the region, below 2°C (Szuwalski, Cody S., et al). However, in the past couple years they’ve begun to disappear to the surprise and dismay of Alaskan’s whose livelihoods depend on the snow crab harvest.

As recently as 2020, the snow crab harvest was raking in hundreds of millions of dollars and supplying jobs to crew members staffing over 60 harvest vessels (Bush, Evan). But in 2021, the signs of the snow crab’s disappearance became evident when billions of snow crabs were missing from the annual population survey. Cody Szuwalski, a lead fishery biologist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), reported to CNN that the survey results blew his mind (Ramirez, Rachel). For years overfishing controls and new population management practices have been put in place to support the snow crab population, so these survey results pointed only to one realistic culprit: climate change. 

In 2018 and 2019, a series of marine heatwaves struck the Bering Sea resulting in as little as 4% of the historically typical ice coverage in the region (Ramirez, Rachel). These heat waves disrupted the “cold pools” that form at the sea floor where the snow crabs reside. Although the rising temperature was not fatal to the snow crabs, as they can function in waters up to 12°C in the laboratory, it is suspected to have increased their internal metabolic rate (Szuwalski, Cody S., et al). This may not seem so bad as we humans associate a positive connotation with high metabolism, but it proved to be fatal to the snow crabs. The increased metabolic rate required snow crabs to increase their caloric intake to unsustainable levels. Under laboratory conditions, it was shown that an increase in water temperature from 0 to 3 °C nearly doubled the snow crabs caloric requirements (Szuwalski, Cody S., et al). With sea floor temperatures exceeding 4 °C during the heat waves, over time, the natural ecosystem could not feed the snow crab population causing a massive die-off from starvation (Kiest, Kristina).

Since 2021 the snow crab harvest has been limited or entirely canceled due to these population shortages. On top of the lost market revenue, millions of dollars in tax revenue has been lost to Alaskan towns, crippling the economy of these isolated settlements. Veteran snow crab harvesters believe the cancellations will force their crews to leave Alaska as the current circumstances are “life-changing, if not career-ending” (Bush, Evan). With no immediate solution other than to continue halting the harvest, the lives of the snow crabs and crew members hang in the balance.

You may not share a similar life experience to snow crab harvesters, but I hope at least you empathize with them, as I believe this case is telling on humans' reliance on other species and the natural resources of our planet. We are all intertwined in our struggle to survive, and human’s abuse and misuse of the planet has led to coming hardship for all. Sure, the average individual can separate out their reusable plastics and become a vegetarian, but until those with greater access to abundant resources stop pumping billions of metric tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere with their private jet joy rides, the bottom feeders of the world, humans and crabs alike, will suffer the consequences.   




References:

Bush, Evan. “Alaska Cancels Snow Crab Season, Threatening Key Economic Driver.”

NBCNews.Com, NBCUniversal News Group, 14 Oct. 2022, 

www.nbcnews.com/science/environment/alaska-cancels-snow-crab-season-threatening-

key-economic-driver-rcna51910. 

Kiest, Kristina. “Recent Warming in the Bering Sea and Its Impact on the Ecosystem.”

NOAA Arctic, 25 Aug. 2023,

arctic.noaa.gov/report-card/report-card-2019/recent-warming-in-the-bering-sea-and-its-i

mpact-on-the-ecosystem/. 

Ramirez, Rachel. “Billions of Crabs Went Missing around Alaska. Scientists Now Know What

Happened to Them.” CNN, Cable News Network, 20 Oct. 2023, 

www.cnn.com/2023/10/19/us/alaska-crabs-ocean-heat-climate/index.html#:~:text=Billion

s%20of%20snow%20crabs%20have,them%20to%20starve%20to%20death. 

Szuwalski, Cody S., et al. “The collapse of Eastern Bering Sea snow crab.” Science, vol. 

382, no. 6668, 2023, pp. 306–310, https://doi.org/10.1126/science.adf6035. 

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