Boom and bust don’t hit much harder than in the Bering Sea. After reaching historically high numbers, the population of snow crabs there cratered by 90 percent following a heat wave in 2018 and 2019. Some 10 billion disappeared. Water temperatures had risen 3 degrees Celsius, but that probably didn’t kill the crabs by overheating them, as you might assume.
“It looks like starvation was likely a key player in the collapse,” says fishery biologist Cody Szuwalski of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Alaska Fishery Science Center, lead author of a recent paper describing the collapse. “There were record numbers of crab, something we’ve never seen before. And it
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