February 10, 2025 — It was a calm January morning, the waters off Bodega Bay unusually smooth, but crab fisherman Dick Ogg couldn’t shake a grim feeling that the day wouldn’t go his way.
The Dungeness crab season had opened just a few weeks earlier — two months behind schedule — and was off to a slow start. “We’re working very hard to basically get nothing,” said Ogg.
The anemic hauls so early in the season mark the latest setback for California’s commercial Dungeness crab fishery, a roughly $45-million-a-year industry that delivers one of the state’s most iconic culinary delights.
The industry’s future has been complicated by another celebrated sea creature: Each year, a number of humpback whales migrating through California’s waters to and from tropical breeding grounds get entangled in commercial crab fishing gear, encounters that often end in mutilation or death. State regulators are intent on lowering the chances of whales coming into contact with the gear.
There’s reason to be concerned.
Since 1970, when the federal government listed humpback whales as “endangered” after they were hunted to near extinction, the population has made a fragile comeback. Whales along the West Coast have recovered at an estimated annual rate of 8.2% since the 1980s, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, with more than 4,500 humpback whales now feeding off California’s coast.