OPINION: Trawlers get a pass in Bering Sea snow crab rebuilding plan

The North Pacific Fishery Management Council, or NPFMC, must decide this month on a 10-year rebuilding plan for Bering Sea snow crab to comply with federal fisheries laws. They have no time to waste: The plan must be in place prior to the start of the 2023/2024 fishing season.

According to the initial environmental assessment of the Rebuilding Plan for Eastern Bering Sea Snow Crab released on Nov. 10, “The main driver in speed of rebuilding for this stock is not fishing mortality, rather it is likely related to recruitment and the conditions that allow for increased recruitment into the population, such as the Arctic Oscillation and physical indicators including, but not limited to, temperature, sea ice extent, resource availability and predator-prey relationships.”

“No measures to modify Eastern Bering Sea snow crab bycatch management in the groundfish fisheries are included in this rebuilding analysis,” the plan states.

In June, the NPFMC selected two snow crab rebuilding alternatives.

Alternative 1: No action, an impossibility due to fishery law requirements.

Alternative 2: Adopt a rebuilding plan and specify a target rebuilding time not to exceed TMAX (the maximum time limit to rebuild the stock). The stock will be considered “rebuilt” once it reaches BMSY (the historical level of stock abundance at which a sustainable harvest can be taken).

There are two options to be considered under Alternative 2.

Option 1: No directed fishing until the stock is rebuilt, allow bycatch removals only.

Option 2: Allow bycatch removals and a directed snow crab fishery under the current State of Alaska harvest strategy.

The analysis states: “Because fishing mortality is not the primary driver of the current snow crab population status, either option does not substantively change the projection of TMIN (the minimum projected rebuilding time); under both options it is assumed that the stock would rebuild within 10 years.”

The NPFMC scientists recognized that both benchmarks could be unrealistic, wrote Terry Haines of Kodiak in an opinion piece for the Kodiak Daily Mirror titled, “Limits of the snow crab rebuilding plan.” Haines is a fishing veteran of more than 30 years, producer of public radio’s Alaska Fisheries Report and a Kodiak City Council member.

He added: “The time it will take to rebuild the stock depends entirely on unpredictable environmental conditions and it’s not known if snow crab will ever return to historical levels of abundance.”

“The allowance, in the projections for recruitment, to eventually increase and contribute to stock growth assumes that existing ecosystem conditions or other constraints on production will not continue indefinitely,” Haines wrote. “However, if recruitment remains at low levels, the population may take substantially longer to show rebuilding progress and may never reach BMSY. This astonishing assessment basically amounts to ‘hopefully environmental conditions will improve and they will come back by themselves, but maybe not.’

“And it is the reverse side of this assessment that is really relevant to Council action, or its lack,” Haines continued.

“As the analysis states: “… fishing mortality is not the primary driver of the current snow crab population status …” Therefore, restrictions on human activities that directly result in crab mortality, whether directed fishing or bycatch, are considered effectively useless in the rebuilding of the stock.”

The Council requested in June 2022 additional information to help determine if the following bycatch management measures would affect the rebuilding timeline:

• Remove the snow crab PSC — prohibited species catch — floor,

• Count all trawl PSC throughout the full range of the stock toward the PSC limit, and

• Limit on fixed gear PSC.

“Analysts concluded that none of the aforementioned bycatch management measures would have any measurable effect on the rebuilding time for EBS snow crab as fishing mortality is not the main driver in rebuilding under the proposed model projections. Therefore, analysts conclude that recovery of the EBS snow crab stock is likely to not be affected by current or predicted bycatch levels, based on average historical bycatch,” according to the rebuilding report.

Non-pelagic (mid-water) trawl fisheries account for the greatest levels of snow crab bycatch in groundfish fisheries. It is highest in the yellowfin sole fishery, followed by flathead sole. All of the participating boats are homeported in Seattle.

Alaska’s 2022/23 snow crab season was cancelled for the first time ever due to the “disappearance” of the stock. Biologists predict it will be at least four years before another fishery might occur.

The snow crab bycatch limit for the trawl sector this season is 3,623,201 individual crabs.

Kodiak-based Laine Welch formerly wrote Fish Factor, a weekly roundup of news and opinion about Alaska’s commercial fishing industry that appears in newspapers and websites around Alaska and nationally. Contact her at msfish@alaskan.com.

The views expressed here are the writer’s and are not necessarily endorsed by the Anchorage Daily News, which welcomes a broad range of viewpoints. To submit a piece for consideration, email commentary(at)adn.com. Send submissions shorter than 200 words to letters@adn.com or click here to submit via any web browser. Read our full guidelines for letters and commentaries here.