The alarm bells rang among fishermen and scientists in earnest in 2022, when billions of snow crabs disappeared from the Bering Sea near Alaska. The first and simplest answer seems to be overfishing, but the truth is different. More likely, the rapidly warming waters stimulated their metabolism, causing the crabs to starve to death.
The Bering Sea ecosystem has changed significantly since the snow crab hunter’s lifetime, warns Michael Letzo, lead author of a study published Wednesday by the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). We should expect more extremely warm years, he adds.
According to the researchers, the probability that the southeastern part of the Bering ice sheet is now ice-free and warmer is about 200 times greater than it was before humans began burning fossil fuels.
Snow crab has a high market value.
Although 2022 was the most tragic year for snow crabs, it wasn’t the only year where their numbers were observed to decline. 2018 and 2019 were almost equally tragic, as rising temperatures also caused the animals’ metabolism to increase, leading to starvation, along with insufficient food.
This tragedy is multi-dimensional. The first is the importance of snow crabs to the Alaskan fishing industry. Their annual trade is worth a quarter of a billion dollars.
According to Michael Litzo, the industry must adapt quickly. “How are we going to do business differently when this process gets worse for the snow crab fishery?” the researcher asks.
Water temperature changes Arctic ecosystem
The deaths of billions of snow crabs are also a wake-up call for the Arctic ecosystem as a whole. According to researchers, the Bering Sea is becoming less hospitable to a growing number of species, including sea lions and red crabs.
The distribution of species in the waters is also changing, something that people who weren’t involved in the study also reported. “We’ve seen changes in species distribution and a mismatch between prey and predators that have contributed to declines in some species, like Pacific cod in the Gulf of Alaska,” Robert Foy, director of the Alaska Fisheries Science Center (AFSC), told CNN.
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