One Billion Crabs Have Had It
Alaska’s snow crabs said: ‘You can’t fire me because I quit’
While you were weathering the pandemic, a thousand million snow crabs walked away. Two years, and the ocean is a billion snow crabs lighter. That is most of all the snow crabs there were. Suddenly they just aren’t there.
Where Did the Crabs Go?
A tiny prose poem from CBS News:
“Did they run up north to get that colder water?” asked Gabriel Prout, whose Kodiak Island fishing business relies heavily on the snow crab population. “Did they completely cross the border? Did they walk off the continental shelf on the edge there, over the Bering Sea?”
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) says Alaska’s warming faster than any other U.S. state, and quite a lot of ice is disappearing there every year. I’ve never met a snow crab, but I can’t imagine it’d want to live in water with no ice. Maybe it crabwalked north.
