Saturday, March 17, 2012

More territory for snow crabbers

Ice has covered much of the Bering Sea crabbing grounds, bedeviling the snow crab fleet.

Now the state Department of Fish and Game is providing some relief by opening an additional area to fishing, starting tomorrow.

Here's the official announcement.

Thus far, individual fishing quota holders have taken 46.9 million pounds of snow crab, or about 59 percent of the total allowable catch.

The season is scheduled to close at the end of May.

5 comments:

Erik V. said...

Too bad the "additional area" is also now covered by ice. They should have done this two weeks or a month ago. This is their relief for not extending the season ending dates, but unfortunately it will not help at this point.

Anonymous said...

Thank god for nature in this case. Perhaps the snow crabs will survive another year to grow bigger and breed well to help the snow crab survive human greed.

The " total allowable catch" is prone to errors like all things human.

Anonymous said...

Dude, you are definitely a human error.

Anonymous said...

thats why they call it fishing ...sometimes you cant catch em ...IFQ or not

Anonymous said...

Anonymous said:

"Perhaps the snow crabs will survive another year to grow bigger and breed well to help the snow crab survive human greed."

This is highly ignorant. Opilios have an extraordinarily high natural mortality of the crab that are larger, and thus of marketable size. Yes, the junior crab will live and grow, but that is the case regardless, as they are the ones that are escaping the pots through mesh size regulations and escapement rings. The big crab are just going to die, whether they get to be eaten by humans or swallowed up by the Bering Sea muddy bottom.