3 ms·

why don't you just make an explicit point instead of having people guess?

pvaldes 4y ago
Because a 200 million dollars industry vanishing overnight is an interesting question. The snow crab population collapsed between 2018 and 2021. We could start assuming that something triggered this collapse. Right? So we could wonder what event happened in 2019 to explain the collapse? Climate change? Predators? Fishermen going crazy? Wrong. The most probable answer is: "nothing happened"... and the second candidate to the pole position is "nobody happened".
- pvaldes 4y ago
  Fisheries aren't the present, they show a snapshot of the past. Fishes need time to grow and cold water crustaceans in particular need a lot of time. Snow crabs mature slowly and can live until 20 years old. Females produce eggs in spring and, as in other crustaceans they have a pelagic cycle. After a while the larvae carried by currents settle in soft sediments and moult into tiny crabs. If they can pass those first years their survival rate boosts. The pelagic larvae known to be difficult to keep alive The snow crabs are 9 years old on average when fished. This means that the crabs that we are missing in 2020 and 2021 would had been born in (2020 - 9) = 2011!. 2011 and 2012. What happened in 2011 in the same area? A tsunami in March and a nuclear power plant accident releasing radioactive water to the sea for several months What we are seeing (In My Arrogant Opinion) is not climate change, or not only this; Is the effect of a mass die-off of >80% of the crab larvae in Alaska by Fukushima water, that happened nine years before but went unnoticed. The Japanese water traveled to Alaska probably just in time to meet the crab reproductive season and hit the eggs or the larvae in their zoea phase. Or maybe the scavenger crabs accumulated radioactive stuff after eating fishes and died later. Of course there was a tsunami also that could have killed some of the adult crabs but didn't happened in Alaska. And the lack of fishermen in the Covid years maybe add a "nobody came to feed the crabs with bycatch" effect. The populations will recover, as long as Japanese will stop trowing garbage to the sea in the crab reproductive season.

Because a 200 million dollars industry vanishing overnight is an interesting question. The snow crab population collapsed between 2018 and 2021. We could start assuming that something triggered this collapse. Right? So we could wonder what event happened in 2019 to explain the collapse? Climate change? Predators? Fishermen going crazy? Wrong. The most probable answer is: "nothing happened"... and the second candidate to the pole position is "nobody happened".

pvaldes 4y ago
Fisheries aren't the present, they show a snapshot of the past. Fishes need time to grow and cold water crustaceans in particular need a lot of time. Snow crabs mature slowly and can live until 20 years old. Females produce eggs in spring and, as in other crustaceans they have a pelagic cycle. After a while the larvae carried by currents settle in soft sediments and moult into tiny crabs. If they can pass those first years their survival rate boosts. The pelagic larvae known to be difficult to keep alive The snow crabs are 9 years old on average when fished. This means that the crabs that we are missing in 2020 and 2021 would had been born in (2020 - 9) = 2011!. 2011 and 2012. What happened in 2011 in the same area? A tsunami in March and a nuclear power plant accident releasing radioactive water to the sea for several months What we are seeing (In My Arrogant Opinion) is not climate change, or not only this; Is the effect of a mass die-off of >80% of the crab larvae in Alaska by Fukushima water, that happened nine years before but went unnoticed. The Japanese water traveled to Alaska probably just in time to meet the crab reproductive season and hit the eggs or the larvae in their zoea phase. Or maybe the scavenger crabs accumulated radioactive stuff after eating fishes and died later. Of course there was a tsunami also that could have killed some of the adult crabs but didn't happened in Alaska. And the lack of fishermen in the Covid years maybe add a "nobody came to feed the crabs with bycatch" effect. The populations will recover, as long as Japanese will stop trowing garbage to the sea in the crab reproductive season.