Anchorage Daily News

KODIAK -- In hopes of reversing a decades-long slump in wild king crab production, the Alaska King Crab Research and Rehabilitation Program (AKCRRAB) was formed as an Alaska Sea Grant partnership with fishermen and coastal communities.

The king crab fishery in Kodiak was once booming, with fishermen catching around 94 million pounds of crab at its peak in 1965 and 1966. It bottomed out about 1982-1983 to less than 5,000 metric tons. There have been more than two decades of fishery closures, yet the Kodiak stock has shown no signs of recovery. Blue king crab from the Pribilofs hasn't had a fishery for about a decade.

AKCRRAB is researching king crab stock enhancement instead of waiting for the crustaceans to come back. The work will help scientists understand what is needed to succeed in large-scale hatchery restoration of red and blue king crab stocks.

In March 2006, a workshop in Kodiak formed the basis for the program. Crustacean experts from around the world gathered to share their perspectives on crab and other crustacean enhancement and rehabilitation, confirming that enhancement of wild crab stocks is scientifically feasible.

The information gained in the workshop was one of the first steps in building the foundation and direction of the project.

According to Alaska Sea Grant, enhancement involves raising crab larvae in a hatchery and releasing juveniles into the wild to increase the size of existing crab stocks.

The university-based program is collaborating with regional fishermen's groups, coastal communities, NOAA Fisheries, the Alutiiq Pride Shellfish Hatchery, the Chugach Regional Resources Commission and the University of Alaska Fairbanks School of Fisheries and Ocean Sciences.

The coalition views these efforts as important to the region's long-term economic development and sustainability.

In 2007, more than 1 million red and blue king crabs hatched at the Alutiiq Pride Shellfish Hatchery in Seward. This was the first step to rebuild stocks around Kodiak and the Pribilof Islands.

"We had chosen red king crab from Kodiak to investigate techniques using king crab culture," said Brian Allee, director of the Alaska Sea Grant college program and research coordinator of AKCRRAB.

The program is in its second year trying to culture juvenile crab. The process is called ocean ranching and is different from farming, Allee said.

"It does not involve holding captive the species for their entire life. It involves release of juveniles like the hatchery program for salmon. You release them as juveniles and they go into the ocean," he said. "Our task is to try and develop the culture techniques. Culturing these juveniles in the larval stages is pretty darn challenging."

Former National Marine Fisheries Service research fishery biologist Brad Stevens and NOAA Fisheries research biologist Sara Persselin paved the way with culturing king crab juveniles in Alaska, but they were doing it on a smaller scale and AKCRRAB is scaling it up, Allee said.

He stressed the importance of collaboration. The program draws on the wealth of existing technology and information.

"It's a complicated ecosystem that we're working in. We want to do no harm. We want to evaluate what we're doing so we also need to develop the technology to do that. That's why we want to collaborate," Allee said.

Ben Daly, an AKCRRAB research biologist working at the Alutiiq Pride Shellfish Hatchery, was recently in Kodiak doing exploratory scuba diving work.

"The basic idea is to get a working knowledge of what kind of habitat these early juvenile red king crabs use and build on the existing knowledge the NMFS folks have already done there," Daly said.

"We're doing preliminary visual surveys looking for aggregations of juvenile king crab and recording the habitats they're in," he said.

Daly said he is getting the Seward hatchery ready for the next year of experiments. It will be a number of years before the crab there can be released into the wild.

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