Alaskan fishers fear another bleak season as crab populations dwindle in warming waters
Gabriel Prout worked four seasons on his father’s crab boat, the Silver Spray, before joining his two brothers in 2020 to buy a half-interest plus access rights for a snow crab fishery that’s typically the largest and richest in the Bering Sea. Then in 2021, disaster: an annual survey found crabs crashing to an all-time low. The red king crab fishery was closed; the snow crab fishery cut to a tenth of the previous year’s take. After another bad survey last year, the red king crab fishery closed again and the snow crab fishery closed for