Saving Seafood

Bering Sea crabbers and communities are struggling with Alaska’s snow crab decline

April 21, 2022 — Bering Sea crabbers and communities in the region are struggling with a steep decline in snow crab this year, likely the result of climate change.

That caused the crab fleet to push farther north than usual and forced places like St. Paul to consider major budget shortfalls, because the Pribilof Island city depends on taxes from fish and crab processing.

The snow crab crash and its impacts are the subject of a recent reporting collaboration between the Seattle Times, the Anchorage Daily News and the Pulitzer Center’s Connected Coastlines reporting initiative.

As part of the “Into the Ice” series, Seattle Times reporter Hal Bernton and ADN photographer Loren Holmes spent two weeks in January aboard a crab boat called the Pinnacle, one of the biggest in the fleet at 137 feet.

Read the full story at KTOO

ALASKA: Snow crab decline hits Bering Sea island community of St. Paul

April 11, 2022 — The Trident Seafoods plant tucked inside this island’s small port is the largest snow crab processor in the nation.

On a cold clear day in January, three Trident workers, within the hold of the Seattle-based Pinnacle, grabbed bunches of the shellfish, and placed them in an enormous brailer basket for their brief trip across a dock. The crab were fed into a hopper to be butchered, cooked, brined and frozen.

Few of the 360 people who live on St. Paul, largest of the four Pribilof Islands, have opted to work in the plant. Instead jobs are filled with recruits from elsewhere.

But the plant still remains a financial underpinning of this Aleut community. Trident pays taxes that help bankroll the expansive services of a city government, which rents apartments, leases construction equipment and even provides plumbers and electricians to make repairs.

This year, the snow crab harvest dropped nearly 90% in a body blow to the city’s budget and to its efforts to keep people from moving away.

City officials estimate the decline in the snow crab harvest, along with the cancellation of the 2021 fall king crab harvest, will result in a loss of $3.25 million in tax revenue. That amount is equal to nearly half of this year’s budget, so city officials in 2023 will have to decide what services to maintain and what they might have to cut back or give up.

Read the full story at The Seattle Times 

Prime Time: Alaska native community proposes co-managed marine sanctuary

December 21, 2021 — Citing observable and worrisome marine ecosystem changes, the Unangax̂ (Aleut) community of St. Paul Island has proposed co-management with the federal government and the community of St. George Island of a new marine sanctuary around the Pribilof Islands of Alaska, “encompassing 100 nm centroid boundaries around the two inhabited islands of St. Paul and St. George,” according to an official nomination proposal that was released Monday, Dec. 20.

For now, the sanctuary would be named Alaĝum Kanuux̂* (pronounced ahl-ah-GOOM ka-NOH), meaning Heart of the Ocean, and encompass nearly 53,000 square miles of waters, excluding a quarter-mile buffer zone around the St. George and St. Paul Harbors and all shoreside and submerged industrial facilities on both islands. The shoreward boundary would be the mean high tide line.

Read the full story at National Fisherman