In the aftermath of the Bering Sea snow crab collapse, a ‘cultural, social, and economic emergency’ (By julia_omalley via grist)
Crab fishermens' pots sit idle outside of the community of St. Paul since the crab crash and subsequent closure. and was produced in collaboration with the Food & Environment Reporting Network, a nonprofit news organization.My small turboprop plane whirred low through thick clouds. Below me, St. Paul Island cut a golden, angular shape in the shadow-dark Bering Sea. I saw a lone island village — a grid of houses, a small harbor, and a road that followed a black ribbon of coast.
Even so, in the last few years, I’ve seen disruptions to economies and food systems, as well as fires, floods, landslides, storms, coastal erosion, and changes to river ice — all escalating at a pace that’s hard to process. Increasingly, my stories veer from science and economics into the fundamental ability of Alaskans to keep living in rural places.You can’t separate how people understand themselves in Alaska from the landscape and animals.
You’re probably familiar with sweet, briney snow crab — Chionoecetes opilio — which is commonly found on the menus of chain restaurants like Red Lobster. A plate of crimson legs with drawn butter there will cost you $32.99. In a regular year, a good portion of the snow crab America eats comes from the plant, owned by the multibillion-dollar company Trident Seafoods.
Some of Alaska’s Indigenous villages have been occupied for thousands of years, but modern rural life can be hard to sustain because of the high costs of groceries and fuel shipped from outside, limited housing, and scarce jobs. St. Paul’s population was already shrinking ahead of the crab crash. Young people departed for educational and job opportunities. Older people left to be closer to medical care. St. George, its sister island, lost its school years ago and now has about 40 residents.
Two-thirds of the world’s population of northern fur seals — hundreds of thousands of animals — return to beaches in the Pribilofs every summer to breed. Valued for their dense, soft fur, they were once hunted to near extinction. On the plane ride in, I read the 2022 book that detailed the history of piracy in the early seal trade on the island, “Roar of the Sea: Treachery, Obsession, and Alaska’s Most Valuable Wildlife” by Deb Vanasse. One of the facts that stayed with me: Profits from Indigenous sealing allowed the U.S. to recoup the $7.2 million it paid for Alaska by 1905. Another: After the purchase, the U.S.
After the war, the Unangax̂ people returned to the island and began to organize and agitate for better conditions. In one famous suit, known as “the corned beef case,” Indigenous residents working in the seal industry filed a complaint with the government in 1951. According to the complaint, their compensation, paid in the form of rations, included corned beef, while white workers on the island received fresh meat.
Back in the 1920s, teachers in the government school put hot sauce on her father’s tongue for speaking Unangam Tunuu, she told me. He didn’t require his children to learn it. There’s a way that language shapes how you understand the land and community around you, she said, and she wanted to preserve the parts of that she could.
“Oh, so we don’t repeat it?” she asked, laughing. “We repeat history. We repeat stupid history, too.” A marine heat wave in the Bering Sea between 2016 and 2019 brought record warmth, preventing ice formation for several winters and affecting numerous cold-water species, including Pacific cod and pollock, seals, seabirds, and several types of crab.
Another has to do with food availability. Crabs depend on cold water — water that’s 2 degrees Celsius , to be exact — that comes from storms and ice melt, forming cold pools on the bottom of the ocean. Scientists theorize that cold water slows crabs’ metabolisms, reducing the animals’ need for food. But with the warmer water on the bottom, they needed more food than was available. It’s possible they starved or cannibalized each other, leading to the crash now underway.
The long-term health of the town, Zavadil told me, wasn’t in a totally dire position yet when it came to the sudden loss of the crab. It had invested during the heyday of crabbing, and with a somewhat reduced budget could likely sustain itself for a decade. “I had someone come up to me the other day and say, ‘The village is dying,’” he said, but he didn’t see it that way. There were still people working and lots of solutions to try.
“You have a prayer or ceremony attached to taking the life of an animal — you connect to it by putting the head back in the water,” she said. “Over at the harbor, he was playing and the waves were sweeping over the dock there. He got swept out and he was never found,” Aaron Lestenkof said. “That’s, like, the only story I remember him telling.”
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