Bering Sea

The majority of Alaska’s Bristol Bay commercial red king crab have been caught for the season. This year’s quota was rather low, coming in at about 2.1 million pounds for the entire fleet. To compare, that’s less than half the total allowable catch, or TAC, for the 2018/2019 season. Ethan Nichols is the Alaska Department of Fish and Game’s area management biologist for groundfish and shellfish in the Bering Sea and Aleutian Islands region. He said even just a couple million pounds was a welcome amount for harvesters during historic lows in the state’s commercial crab industry.

Encounters with humans from 2017 to 2021 killed hundreds of Steller sea lions and other marine mammals that swim in Alaska waters, along with dozens of Alaska whales, according to a new federal report.

When scientists estimated that more than 10 billion snow crab had disappeared from the Eastern Bering Sea between 2018 and 2021, industry stakeholders and fisheries scientists had several ideas about where they’d gone. Some thought bycatch, disease, cannibalism, or crab fishing, while others believed it could be predation from other sea animals like Pacific cod. But now, scientists say they’ve distinguished the most likely cause for the disappearance. The culprit is a marine heatwave between 2018 and 2019, according to a new study authored by a group of scientists with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

The Center for Biological Diversity said in a Monday statement that NOAA Fisheries needs to uphold its duty to protect the killer whales, which are protected by the Marine Mammal Protection Act.

The Center for Biological Diversity intends to sue the federal government over a new marine highway in Alaska. The environmental group sent a notice letter on Sept. 21 to the U.S. Maritime Administration, which designated the new highway. The letter contends that the federal agency is violating the Endangered Species Act for failing to consider possible harm to endangered wildlife along Alaska’s coast.

Starting in January, the fleet will fish under a “rationalization” system where each catcher vessel will have a maximum catch limit, which will be assigned through quota.

Several U.S. Navy warships were dispatched to the Aleutian Islands last week, after 11 Chinese and Russian military vessels were found operating in the region. The exact location of the foreign ships was not disclosed.

Coastal Alaska is on the front lines of climate change. Extreme weather events are becoming more common, and many communities along Alaska’s shores wonder if the future will bring more of the same. A group of researchers tries to answer what storms might look like in the future by turning toward the past.

While many Bering Sea crab populations find themselves in free fall, Dungeness crab is breaking records in regions that used to hardly see them.

The fishing season has ended for Bering Sea Tanner crab. Crabbers caught the record-low quota of two million pounds just before the end of March.