A few years ago, snow crab populations in Alaska collapsed. Hear how NOAA biologists solved the mystery of what happened to them.
0:00:05.5 Speaker 2: For the first time in US history, the Bering Sea snow crab season is cancelled.
0:00:36.9 Dr. Cody Szuwalski: In 2018, we had seen more crab than we had ever seen in the Bering Sea. So, this decline of roughly 10 billion crab with a B from 2018 to 2021 was a precipitous unexpected collapse.0:00:55.0 DS: Yeah, so the collapse really, like the story starts in 2018. 0:01:39.3 DS: There were basically two levels to the detective process. And the first was to figure out whether or not they moved or whether or not we thought they died.0:01:48.2 DS: Mortality seemed to be the culprit. We started pulling hypotheses out from the literature and crab experts and we sat in a room and talked about it. And some of the big ones are things like cod predation or cannibalism or disease. There could be indirect fishery effects or temperature effects on crab.
0:04:08.1 DS: Yeah, I think it's important to always remember that ecological work in this context is really detective work because we get to observe the population once a year. We go down in the summertime. That's the only time we can get there because there's ice over the Bering Sea most of the other times. It's under 150 meters of water. So, I don't get to directly observe these crab dying. So, it was a bit of detective work.
0:05:56.7 DS: Absolutely. And I have built models like this and will hopefully publish them in the not too distant future. There are a number of challenges with building these sorts of models. The first and most basic is that a lot of the times we're moving into environmental conditions that we've never observed before.
0:08:30.7 JS: Yeah, it's really it's really awful. And it it was bad enough that the Secretary of Commerce declared a disaster. You know, it was some funding entering the area to mitigate it, but nothing's going to replace the resource.
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