Did Bottom Trawling Help Cause Collapse of Alaska King Crab?
New Paper Says It Did In the early 1980s, the king crab population in Alaska’s Bristol Bay plummeted precipitously. A prevalent theory—according to environmentalists, one endorsed and promulgated by the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS)—was that natural factors, such as climatic changes, were responsible. That has now been seriously challenged by a paper in the journal Ecological Applications. The paper, by NMFS scientists Braxton Dew and Robert McConnaughey, argues instead that intensive bottom trawling in a previously protected area, beginning in the mid-to-late 1970s, was significantly responsible. The largest population of king crab in the world resides off the west coast of Kamchatka in the Sea of Okhotsk. The second largest is in Bristol Bay. Dew and McConnaughey point out that one of the reasons for the success of both populations is the so-called “endless belt” reproductive strategy, which requires a broad coastal shelf and a longshore current; a critical factor in the s
