Oh snow!

The snow crab population in the eastern Bering Sea is experiencing a decline which affected the 2016/2017 fishery, which I reported here. That fishery is just now finishing up with the first boat loaded and headed home (shared by the Alaska Bering Sea Crabbers). How that fishery performed and how that population is affected will have cascading impacts on market prices, new snow crab products (like McDonald's snow crab sandwich), next year's population health, and next year's fishery catch limits.

That's the Alaska side. What about Canada's snow crab fishery? They're probably doing good, eh? I mean, they have this guy:

(source: New York Times)

Sadly, even Justin Trudeau can't help the snow crabs. The Department of Fisheries and Oceans (DFO) just released their snow crab stock assessment which shows that the biomass of legal crab for the Newfoundland and Labrador fishery has declined by 80% since 2013.

EIGHTY PERCENT!!!

You guys. That's so bad. As Darrell Mullowney of the DFO says, "It's not a good news story." Or as Keith Sullivan of the Fish, Food and Allied Workers Union says, "It's terrible, terrible news for people in the industry." Yeah man, terrible for the industry AND terrible for the crabs and their ecosystem. Remember, humans aren't the only ones who like to eat snow crabs. Atlantic cods do too, and they haven't really been living high on the hog anyway (what with its collapse in 1992).

Atlantic cod Gadus morhua (source: Joachim S. Müller)

So it seems that our Bering Sea opies aren't the only ones facing declines. Again, Mullowney commented on the global scale of depressed snow crab stocks, particularly in their southern most areas: "The magnitude of this in terms of socioeconomics I can't really quantify." We'll have to wait and see.

This is testing my resolve, y'all

A while back I wrote a pretty honest blog about my feelings regarding lobster rolls. TL/DR: they're trash. Cut to last week when I saw this:

McDonald's is testing out a "snow crab sandwich" in San Francisco and I have SO MANY QUESTIONS!

1. YAY snow crab!

2. Wait, is it really snow crab Chionoecetes opilio? "Snow crab" could be Chionoecetes bairdi aka Tanner crab, or something else.

3. Is it 100% "snow crab" or a mix like those nasty, nasty lobster rolls?

4. Shoot, is this just another waste of good meat that should be happily dipped in garlic butter? Do I hold crab, even snow crab, to the same high standard of lobster? Because I love crab dip so much, do I really have room to judge a crab sandwich? (No. The answer is No.)

5. Opies and Tanners are having a rough time, population-wise, in the Bering Sea, with both stocks in decline and the Tanner fishery not even opened. If this sandwich does well, how will the demand of a fast food empire affect the snow crab market? Bering Sea opilio price-per-pound is already high (over $8.00 compared to last year's $5.90) because of the decline in population and subsequent decline in fishery production.

If you are in the Bay Area and are feeling adventurous, try out the new sandwich and let me know what you think!

Big Trouble in Little Bering Sea

Oh man, you guys. This is a doozy.

I posted a brief Tanner crab (Chionoecetes bairdi) update from Alaska Department of Fish and Game yesterday on Facebook. TL;DR - the Bering Sea fishery for bairdis is closed for the 2016/2017 season.

The bairdi fishery in the Bering Sea has had a rocky past with openings and closures fluctuating throughout the years, but it was starting to look good again even as recently as 2015! The fishery was closed from 1997 - 2004, open fully 2006 - 2009, closed again from 2010 - 2013, then open fully until 2015 with high catches and high vessel participation (112 vessels in the 2015/2016 season compared to 32 in 2013/2014).

from the 2016 crab SAFE data

You can read all about the fishery in the latest Bering Sea/Aleutian Islands stock assessment and fishery management report (in nerd lingo - the crab SAFE), which is put out by the North Pacific Fishery Management Council. Here's a link to the Crab Plan Team with all their fun reports, and this link will send you to the current Council meeting (happening now) where you can find the 2016 crab SAFE in the Agenda. It's listed under "C. Major Issues/Final Action Items" as the first item.

OK, so that's bairdi, but you all know I really love me some opies. How are they doing?

Not good. ADF&G announced that Bering Sea snow crab will be open this year (October 15th, as usual) but with the lowest total allowable catch (TAC) in 45 years. The low TAC, at 21.57 million pounds, is  nearly HALF of what it was last year (40.57 million pounds)! Why? Because surveys of the crabs have shown a decline in the number of mature males out there (who we like to eat) AND mature females out there (who make the babies).

from the 2016 crab SAFE data

This low baby-makin' biomass means potentially fewer adults in the future. That's why management has to be so conservative to allow for the crabs to do their business and replenish the stock. But for the moment it also means low catches and A LOT less money for our crab fishermen, processors, and on down the line. The other thing fishermen have to worry about is any accidental retention of bairdis since that fishery is closed, making these crab-cousins prohibited.

opilio up top, bairdi on bottom

Good luck, crabs!

Wearable crabs

OK, you know I love me some good crab swag (see exhibit A (for 'awesome', and 'Amelia')), but a new company is taking crab swag up a notch! Tidal Vision is going to take the old carapaces of snow crabs and turn them into shirts and other clothes! Doesn't that sound amazing?!? And strange, potentially smelly, and likely scratchy?

not that Maru minds...

Nope, don't worry: Tidal Vision assures that the fabric feels similar to cotton. And a bonus is that it has natural anti-bacterial and -microbial properties! Because of those properties, they're marketing the shirts as performance wear called "Chitoskin". Brilliant!

So what is chitosan, you're asking? Chitosan comes from chitin, which is what crustacean shells are made of. By treating chitin with sodium hydroxide (NaOH aka lye), you get chitosan! Those of you who took high school chemistry may remember using sodium hydroxide to increase the pH of an acidic solution. Mmmm, titrations!

ANYWAY, Tidal Vision is using snow crab shells, as well as salmon skins for wallets and belts, to reduce waste from the fisheries. That's something I can definitely wear proudly!

(from Tidal Vision)

OH MY GOSH, by the way, I guess the whole cat-in-a-crab-hat thing happens A LOT in Japan! I will post photos of my cats if I get them wearing Dungies!

I'm getting published!

Hey there! I've been working on this for a little bit the last 6 years (grad school + coming to terms with publishing my Master's thesis while starting a 'real' job...) but it's finally almost here:

Relationship of molting, gonadosomatic index, and methyl farnesoate

in male snow crab (Chionoecetes opilio) from the eastern Bering Sea

It's been accepted for publication in the Journal of Crustacean Biology and you can read the abstract from the advanced article here. To say I'm pretty pumped would be an understatement! I've had cod and pollock and humpback whales swimming through my brain so much lately that it's nice to get crabby once more! Not like this:

But more like this:

from here via here

Thanks, crabs, I couldn't have done it without you!

Anchorage Crab Extravaganza!

Last week 2 weeks ago (time flies!) I attended the 2014 Alaska Marine Science Symposium, and boy was it crab-tastic! I went to present a couple posters on my work with the Gulf of Alaska Project (my portion is studying baby fish body condition), but you better believe I stopped at all the crab posters I could find!

Here's a run-down of some of the neat crabby things I learned:

Snow crabs are loving detritus up in the arctic! Lauren Divine looked at Chionoecetes opilio stomach contents from crabs collected in the Chukchi and Beaufort Seas. Along with detritus, crabs were eating polychaetes, bivalves, brittle stars (you can see a pile of them from this post), and other crabs including opies!

Lauren showing off her poster and special friend

that's a larger-than-life snow crab ready to show you...

...its stomach contents!

Alaska Department of Fish and Game is mapping Tanner crab (Chionoecetes bairdi) habitat to better understand their distribution off of Kodiak. The fun part of this: underwater pictures of crabs in action!

(download the abstracts here)

Ocean acidification will affect larval Tanner crabs as the ocean's pH drops. Here's Chris Long presenting his work where they exposed brooding females to different levels of pH (the lower the pH, the more "acidified" the water is). The greatest effect was toward larval survival. He also gave a talk on how a similar experiment affected the embryos of Tanner crabs (there's a difference... I can explain further if you'd like) and they weren't doing too well either.

over-achiever: giving a poster presentation AND a talk!

Remember how I said aging crabs was near-impossible? Alexei Pinchuk, Ginny Eckert, and Rodger Harvey are out to prove me wrong!

"Development of Biochemical Measures of Age in the Alaskan Red King Crab:

Towards Quantifying Thermal Effect on Aging"

Last but not least, I learned about ZOMBIE CRABS!!! (No, not these zombie crabs.) Leah Sloan, a UAF grad student, is looking at the distribution of that nasty parasite, the rhizocephalan, and how it may be affected by temperature. The infected king crabs she's studying are referred to as 'zombie crabs' because their bodies have basically been hijacked by the parasite to be a walking, eating, parasite-brooding machine! She's answering her temperature question by exposing larval rhizocephalans (aka parasitic barnacles) to different temperatures and tracking their survival. I'll interview her soon for an "Ask a Grad Student" post so we can all learn more.

she had me at "Zombie"!

I took so many other crab notes, so we'll see if I can share them all with you over the next... year!?!? By then I'll be ready for another round of Marine Science Symposium fun!

Ask A Grad Student: Lauren Divine

Summer is ending and with it ends the summer survey season. (Luckily for me I'm heading out on a fall survey, so I still have sea days to look forward to!) Fisheries graduate student Lauren Divine went to sea last year and wanted to share her experience with everyone, especially those of you who haven't had the pleasure of taking a "cruise" in the Chukchi Sea!

Age: 27

Degree: BS Wildlife and Fisheries Management, MS Biology, PhD Marine Biology (in progress)

Current City: Fairbanks! Golden Heart City!

1. Describe your project, in 4 sentences or less.

My project looks at snow crab in the Alaskan Arctic (Chukchi and Beaufort Seas). I am interested in how they fit into the benthic food webs in this region because they link lower trophic levels to more charismatic species such as walruses, seals, and whales. I'm also interested in how many snow crabs are actually in the Arctic, where they can be found, and how big they are. Finally, I hope to look at the likelihood of a fishery for snow crabs opening in the Arctic under future climate changes and fisheries management scenarios. BOOM.

an arctic snow crab! AHHHHHH!

2. You recently got to work in the Chukchi Sea (I am trying to contain my jealousy). What was the biggest challenge you had working on deck, and how did you overcome it? What was the best/craziest/most amazing thing you saw out there?

The biggest challenge for me wasn't the time on deck, it was the massive amount of time that we spent inside the boat. I was expecting to be on deck a lot more than we actually were because the catches were small, so adjusting to the large amount of time on a small vessel was the most difficult. Getting out on deck was the highlight of the day! I also battled sea sickness for about a week and a half, so getting out in the fresh air helped me a lot.

icy fresh air!

The most amazing thing I saw was a polar bear on a huge floating ice berg. We had been floating close to the ice edge for a few days and seen lots of bergs, but this one had an exceptional guest!

oh hi!
(This image was taken as an observation of a marine mammal sighting aboard a NOAA chartered vessel for scientific research. This animal was well past the required distance from the vessel at all times and did not appear to show any reaction to the presence of the vessel. The vessel proceeded at a safe speed until the animal was out of sight.)

"I'm just chillin' out" - polar bear

*ba-dum-bum*

3. Why Alaska? What's your favorite thing about Fairbanks?

I was coming out of a master's program in Statesboro, GA and was really looking for a challenge and an adventure. This fit what I was looking for! My favorite thing about Fairbanks is the extreme light during the summer! I am outside all the time, the gardening is fantastic, and everything about the summers is worth suffering through the winters for!

live life Alaskan!

4. You're a mom - how do you juggle classes, research, and parenting? Was it a difficult choice to get your Master's degree as a mother, or was it a pretty straight forward, go get 'em plan?

I had Brynn as an undergraduate. I was fortunate enough to get to take a year off after graduation and spend time with her (while guiding rock climbing trips!). I decided to get a master's because I had not been having much luck with the job market after graduating with my BS, so the choice was kind of made for me. The master's program was certainly a learning trial. I am very thankful that I have a good support system in place. If an emergency comes up, I can always count on a friend or family member to take Brynn for a while. If Brynn has an emergency, I have the flexibility in my schedule to take care of it and catch up on my work later. I have been known to tote Brynn to a meeting or sit through the occasional lecture with my little side-kick watching iPad cartoons with headphones on! I think everyone goes through their own challenges during graduate school, mine are certainly not unique. One thing I will say, however, is that I have learned how to be very productive with the time that I have; it is what you make of it after all, right?

eeeeh - baby crab!

(it's almost as cute as Brynn)

5. What is your favorite piece of crab paraphernalia?

Good question. I am certainly lacking in this department... I don't own crab jewelry or clothing. I do have a head scarf that is pink and has tiny blue crabs and corals on it. That is probably my favorite, along with my "Snow Crab Love" mug! Thanks Molly! :)

You're welcome, Lauren! Thanks for sharing your photos!

How low can they go?

You didn't think I forgot about answering the questions from our crab chat did you? Nope! The next question to answer is:

Just how deep in the ocean do king crabs and snow crabs live?

To answer this I looked at the crab survey data from 2012. This is only looking at Bering Sea crabs in summer, so it's a little limited, but I figured it was a great place to start. Here's what I learned:

King crabs really stay out of each others' way! Every sampling location that found red king crabs was absent of blue king crabs. Also, on average, blue kings were found deeper in the Bering Sea than red kings; the average blue king crab depth was 87.6 meters (287.5 feet) and the average red king crab depth was 51.7 meters (169.7 feet). This was interesting to me because the bycatch of blue king crabs in red king crab fisheries has closed down red king fisheries in the past (due to low blue king crab abundance), but it would seem that for the summer of 2012 that might not have been a concern.

Heading deeper into the Bering Sea, I found the Chionoecetes crabs! Both Chionoecetes bairdi and Chionoecetes opilio liked an average depth around 91 meters (91.5 m and 91.4 m, respectively), which is close to 300 feet. Unlike the king crabs, these Chionoecetes cousins hung out together quite a bit, which isn't too shocking since they're known to hybridize.

gross

The thing that caught my eye with hybrid Tanner crabs was that their average depth was slightly shallower than the two "pure blooded" crabs (88.1 meters). If I didn't have a real job, I would look into the sex distribution of male and female bairdi and opilio crabs and compare that to the distribution of hybrids to finally answer who's mating with whom. Anyone else want to check it out!?!? Let me know. (Seriously. I'm totally interested.)

average depths (in meters) for the locations where red king crab,

blue king crab, Chionoecetes bairdi, C. opilio, or their hybrids were present

The other thing that caught my eye is that hybrid crab presence was NOT dependent on both "pure" crabs being there (during the survey, that is). Of the 157 sites that had hybrids, 25 sites were missing on of the original species. Plus, there were 70 sites that had both bairdi and opilio crabs but no hybrids. (Fun fact: those sites had a deeper average at 107.4 meters.)

So, that's how low king crabs and snow crabs can go! For perspective, if the Bering Sea's depth was in line with a football field, red kings would make it just past the 50 yard line while blue kings and hybrid Tanners would be in the red zone. But bairdis and opilios would go ALL. THE. WAY!!!

Cold Crabs Conquer Puberty!

Cold crabs terminally molt at smaller sizes than warm crabs!

What?

OK, let's start over. You know how snow crabs have a final, or terminal molt? Instead of molting every year and growing, snow crabs will molt up to a certain (as yet undetermined) point, then stop molting. The terminal molt is marked by their claws growing larger than the rest of their body's growth, meaning that, if they were humans, all of a sudden you'd see this guy:

He's never going to get any bigger. He's terminally molted.

The tricky thing with snow crabs is that they'll terminally molt at all sorts of different sizes, so while some may max out at 2 inches carapace width, others can grow to over 4 inches (and beyond). Because of their terminal molt, some snow crabs will never grow large enough to be legally harvested for the commercial fishery (the size limit is 78 mm or ~3 inches). For example, below is a plot of snow crabs surveyed in the Bering Sea last summer (2012), with a bright orange line marking the legal size limit.

 you can tell the large clawed, terminally molted males

from the small clawed (still have at least one more in 'em) males

based on the proportion of their claw ("chela") height to their carapace width

For the males that are designated "small clawed", they're not worried being to the left of that orange line: they will molt at least once more and potentially grow larger than 78 mm, thus grow into the fishery! But the "large clawed" males aren't getting any bigger than what you see, so all those dark circles to the left of the orange line are snow crabs that can mate with the ladies but won't be on your dinner plate any time soon ever. So what's the worry? We've discussed this idea before that the smaller terminally molted males may end up reproducing more than the larger guys simply because they won't be picked up by the fishery and will have more time to sow their crabby oats on the Bering Sea floor. If size at terminal molt is a heritable trait, this could lead to more snow crabs at small sizes, which would obviously be bad for the fishery.

But where does temperature come in?!?!? Keep your pants on, I'm getting there! The colder the temperature, the smaller the males seem to be when they have their final molt (see Dawe et al., 2012). In higher latitudes, like the North Atlantic and North Pacific, this means a greater proportion of males that won't enter the fishery. That's definitely bad for fishermen.

HOWEVER, (picture Marisa Tomei saying that)

... if ocean temperatures continue to warm as they are already, more males will terminally molt at larger sizes! We just don't know how the increased temperatures will affect other aspects of their metabolism, so it's up in the air about whether or not global climate change is a bonus for male snow crab size. I guess we'll find out!

Read more from this post and from this paper:
Dawe, E. G., D. Mullowney, M. Moriyasu, and E. Wade. 2012. Effect of temperature on size-at-terminal molt and molting frequency in snow crab Chionoecetes opilio from two Canadian Atlantic ecosystems. Marine Ecology Progress Series 469: 279–296.

Big Ol' Crab!

Time to answer another chat question! Remember that I had the chance to talk with crab lovers through an online forum? They asked a lot of questions that I didn't get to fully answer, so I'm trying to tackle them now, one by one. This week's question is

What was the largest snow crab ever caught?

Well, the internet is telling me that the largest snow crab (Chionoecetes opilio) known in modern history was caught off of Newfoundland and weighed in at a stunning 26 lbs! How big is that really? Think about the crabs you see at Red Lobster: those guys are around 3 - 4 inches wide (just their carapace, not including their legs) and probably aren't seen bigger than 6 inches wide. They'll weigh in around 0.5 - 2.0 pounds. So, when thinking of a 26 pounder, how big would that guy have been??

 this big? (at the Yeongdeok Snow Crab Festival)

Using the carapace widths and wet weights from my eastern Bering Sea snow crabs, I did a little fast and not-too-legit math:

R!

A 26 pound snow crab could have a carapace width almost 1 foot wide! Imagine a Subway sandwich, but that's just the body of the crab; it will also have 5 legs that are each well over a foot! I wish that someone had taken a picture of this behemoth, but until I find one (or any of you guys send me one), this will have to do:

 can you imagine!?!

(yes, I overlayed an opie on top of my red king crab photo,

but the proportions are about right)

Cod are just like people:

They love to eat snow crabs!

You may remember meeting Laurinda Marcello through an interview last year as a student, but she's since graduated and published her results! Her paper looked at how snow crab recruitment is affected by water temperature and cold area extent, spawning stock biomass (how many crabs are out there makin' babies), and the biomass of crab predators (cod!). As a bonus, she compared these relationships between the Bering Sea and the Canadian North Atlantic.

What did she find out? Let's start with the predators! We know that cod like to eat snow crabs. I've had a cod puke little baby snow crabs on me (it had been through a lot, the poor cod, so I wasn't mad or anything). And check out this piece of knowledge:

snow crabs (in the orange square) make up a relatively large percentage

of both frequency of occurence (%FO, on the top half of the figure)

and stomach content weight (%W, on the bottom half) compared to

red king crabs and Tanner crabs in Pacific cod stomachs (from this paper)

Interestingly enough, Laurinda's study only saw an inverse relationship between predator abundance and snow crab recruitment in one study area! The rest of the areas had no real pattern. This could suggest that, while cod eat snow crab, there may not be enough predation on their part to be considered a top-down effect on snow crab recruitment. (That's a big statement up in here!) However, she warned us not to be too hasty with this conclusion as predator biomass may not mean direct predation pressure on the crabs.

Moving on, spawning stock biomass in both the Bering Sea and one portion of the North Atlantic study area was inversely related to recruitment. What? More baby-makers mean less babies? Crazy town sea, right? Laurinda posited that since snow crab reproduction relies on not only males and females to be present, but for them to be within each other's vicinity, simply looking at the number of adults may not accurately represent the number of mating adults. There's also the case of cannibalism in snow crabs: more adults mean more cannibalistic mouths to feed!

"Get into my belly!" - large snow crab

The big result was that the main factor associated with snow crab recruitment was the ocean climate. From her paper, "[t]his strongly supports our hypothesis... that cold conditions during early life history stages promote subsequent snow crab recruitment."

the colder the temperature (to a point), the more recruits to the fishery!

Cool! (Get it? wink.) Congratulations on the paper, Laurinda!

Read the full paper:
Marcello, L. A., F. J. Mueter, E. G. Dawe, and M. Moriyasu. 2012. Effects of temperature and gadid predation on snow crab recruitment: comparisons between the Bering Sea and Atlantic Canada. Marine Ecology Progress Series 469: 249 - 261. doi: 10.3354/meps09766

Sweet Crab Treat

My friends Rachael and Chris gave me a sweet crab-shaped cookie cutter for my birthday!

They must have known that I've been coveting a crustacean cookie cutter for quite some time, and I didn't waste any using my new toy making:

Shortbread Crabs

I used a recipe from Claire Robinson, host of 5 Ingredient Fix on the Food Network, because if there's one thing I like, it's easy recipes. And snow crabs. But 'easy recipes' is up there. The best part of this recipe is you don't actually need a cookie cutter, but if you have a crab-shaped one it makes it that much more fun.

Ingredients:
2 cups all-purpose flour
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/2 cup plus 2 tablespoons powdered sugar
1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract
1 cup (2 sticks) unsalted butter, room temperature, cut into chunks
1 teaspoon water

everything you'll need for the cookies and the decorations

Directions:
1. Add the flour, salt, and powdered sugar to a food processor and pulse to combine. Add in the vanilla, the butter and the 1 teaspoon of water. Pulse together just until a dough is formed. Put the dough on a sheet of plastic wrap and roll into a log, about 2 1/2 inches in diameter and 5 inches long. Tightly twist each end of the wrap in opposite directions. Chill the dough in the refrigerator for at least 30 minutes.

I didn't have plastic wrap, so I rolled the dough in a plastic baggie

2. Preheat the oven to 375 degrees F. (The original instructions called for this step at the very beginning, but who needs their oven preheating for 30 minutes or more while they mix and cool their dough?)

3. If you don't have a cookie cutter, you can cut the log of dough into 1/3-inch medallions and bake them as sweet little circles on your sheet. Otherwise, roll out the dough on a clean, dry, floured surface to about 1/3-inch thickness. Bring on the cookie cutter joy, placing your crabs on a nonstick cookie sheet or a buttered baking sheet, and re-rolling the leftover dough to make more crab cookies.

I don't have a rolling pin, but a glass does just fine

my salt and pepper shakers oversaw the cutter placement

4. Bake until the edges are just light brown, about 12 to 14 minutes. Remove from the oven and let cool on the cookie sheets for 5 minutes. Transfer to wire racks and cool until room temperature.

golden goodness on those chelae and dactyls

 5. The fun part: decorate your cookies! I used frosting for half and left the other half plain because my husband doesn't like frosted cookies (I know, who did I marry?!?!). The plain guys got eyes before they were baked, but the frosted guys got eyes after they were all done up in cream cheesy goodness. Notice the eyes are green because they're opilios. I used mint M&Ms and they were a hit!

frosted or not, these cookies were tasty!

This made me think of the article I had read and mentioned in my last post: would a plain crab cookie taste better than one with epibionts extra toppings? I made one to find out:

see the barnacles (frosting dots) and

leech egg cases (pumpkin seeds) on the old-shell crab? 

the verdict: he was delicious!

(you can also see my sweet goldfish

in the background, mentioned here)

Are old shells really that bad?

I mentioned last month that the Bering Sea snow crab fishery's quota had been reduced by about 25%, and I explained that the reduction was probably in part due to the decrease in mature male biomass that was seen during the 2012 summer trawl survey:

mature male biomass estimates in tons from the NMFS summer trawl surveys:
the fishery was declared rebuilt last year, but you can see the decrease
in males with a carapace width ≥ 95 mm from 2011 to 2012

The cut in quota wasn't due to that decrease alone; there was also a higher proportion of old-shell males within the survey. Why is this a problem? Old-shell males are not as commercially valuable as new-shell males because of their visual appeal (or lack thereof).

newly molted "new-shell" males on top and
males that have been around the block a few times, aka "old-shell" males

This article is great for explaining the issue of old-shell males in the fishery, plus it has some quotes from our good crab friend, and fishery biologist with ADF&G Kodiak, Doug Pengilly (holla!). I highly recommend you read it (you may have already if you follow Snow Crab Love on facebook) because it also mentions how the decrease in quota may or may not affect the value of the fishery. I bring it up simply because I'm curious what you all think:

Would you buy crabs that may have some barnacles growing on them or some scratches on their bodies that make them appear not-so-shiny? Or are you happy to get 'em clean?

Let me know!

October opies

Oh man, I love October! From the changing leaves (which is the #1 thing I miss the most from Illinois [#2 is Lou Malnati's pizza]), to the pumpkin-flavored everything, to Halloween costumes, you just can't beat October!

these guys know what I'm talking about!

(OK, they're really celebrating the Aliwan Fiesta in the Philippines,

but I bet anyone could pull off that get-up for Halloween!)

Another exciting thing that comes with October is the snow crab fishery opening! The quota was decreased this year to 66.3 million pounds of crab from last year's nearly 90 million pounds. That's taking out about a quarter of the pounds from last year, but we have to remember that last year was an exciting one with a 64% raise in quota and the stock no longer declared overfished! So, while this year is going to be less profitable than last year for fishermen (and less tasty for snow crab munchers around the world), it will still be better than 2 years ago.

mature male biomass for commercial crab species caught

during the eastern Bering Sea trawl surveys

You may remember last year that I said we'd have to stay tuned to this fishery because of how variable the snow crab population can be any given year. In the graph above from a draft copy of this year's summer trawl survey, you can see how the snow crab biomass dipped down from 2011 to 2012, so the decrease in quota makes sense for this year's fishery: less mature males out there = less mature males to catch. Again, given the variable nature of the snow crab population, a decrease this year doesn't mean a decrease next year. With continued care of the fishery, it may very well increase, and at the very least be a healthy fishery for the following seasons! That will keep this kid happy:

and isn't that what fishery management is all about?