The official story is something like “a billion snow crabs disappeared.”
If that sounds fishy to you, keep reading. Let’s dive into the ecology, oceanography, & geopolitical history of the Bering Sea.
A science thread on crabs, corruption, & collapse: 🦀
To begin, let’s differentiate the two major commercially-exploited and now crashed populations of crab in the Bering Sea: the snow and the king.
Their behavior and life histories are very different. So are their collapses. Let’s start by recounting the recent one: the snow crab.
As sea ice forms in winter, salt is expelled and cold, dense water sinks to the floor of the Bering continental shelf, forming what marine ecologists call the “cold pool”. This is where young snow crabs grow up with abundant food, in water too cold for many predators… until now.
As the planet has heated, the shrinking cold pool has put snow crabs’ backs against the wall. Where once safe, juvenile crabs can be caught by predators like cod penetrating the warming water. Evidence shows the young crabs have followed the pool north.
The cold pool connects the snow crab to climate collapse. But let’s not forget that on top of all these environmental factors is industrial-scale extraction and bycatch by the fishing industry. What role is this playing? We’ll come back to that.
First, let’s study their counterpart: the king. King crabs once numbered in the hundreds of millions in the Bering Sea, but crashed in the early 80s and never recovered, numbering less than 10 million in recent years.
Who killed the king crab?
The story is crazy.
In 1959, Japan established a no-trawl zone protecting the breeding territory of king crabs in the Bering Sea. It was a success. Catches were increasing. But in 1976, everything changed when the US passed a law called the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act.
The Magnuson–Stevens Act codified a management concept called Maximum Sustainable Yield, directing regulators to pursue maximum extraction of marine life. It also codified the concept of the Exclusive Economic Zone, extending 200 mi. from shore — effectively annexing the reserve.
Then, in 1980 — in the midst of the Cold War — the US and USSR joined forces to trawl the reserve, targeting sole. In a period of five years, bycatch of king crabs increased by more than 600%. King crab populations plummeted to single digit proportions.
These words from the director of @PEERorg, the government employee transparency group who published the whistleblower testimony, should be considered in the context of the more recent snow crab collapse, described by NOAA and echoed by media as a mysterious natural phenomenon:
Many have linked the snow crab collapse to climatic contraction of the sea ice. But it doesn’t seem that warm water alone killed the crabs. Was it all predators? Disease?
Or is it possible the role of the fishing industry has been downplayed yet again?
Geotransmitter data compiled by @GlobalFishWatch indicate fishing vessels took advantage of the contracting sea ice. On the left is winter & spring fishing in 2013, a more normal ice year. On the right is the same season in 2020, during the sea ice lows.
When we dig further into the vessel logs, a striking pattern emerges: scores of ships trawling for hundreds of hours across the Northern reaches of the Eastern Bering Sea floor during critical breeding months in areas where snow crabs once could take shelter beneath the ice.
Corroborating the geospatial data, observer data from @NOAAFisheries stock assessments show a massive spike in snow crab fishing mortality correlating with the record low years for Bering Sea ice.
NOAA assures us trawl bycatch is a small contributor to total crab mortality, but observer data often underestimate collateral deaths, trawl bycatch is just one expression of increased fishing impact, & recall — they said the same thing about king crab.
Our story begins in Rhodesia: a now-extinct British colony in Southern Africa.
As Britain had little land and high demand for meat, ranching cattle and sheep for export became an important sector of the Rhodesian economy.
But colonists met some challenges…
There were already grazers on the Zimbabwean savannas: antelope of all kinds, buffalo, zebra, rhinoceros — but one animal above all interfered with the colonial agricultural project: the elephant.
Historic buffalo populations only produced around 1/3 the methane emissions of US cattle ranches today, according to population reconstructions and industry feed trial data.
THE CAMPAIGN TO GREENWASH FACTORY FARMING IN THE AMAZON
A $10+ million JBS ranching firm backed by McDonald’s & Bain Capital is pitching industrialization of the Brazilian ranching sector as the solution to deforestation.
PECSA, a Portuguese acronym for Amazon Sustainable Cattle Ranching, was cofounded by meat giant JBS & ICV Capital Ventures, a Bain-backed nonprofit trading in solutions to Amazon deforestation. It’s headed by former Bain consultant Laurent Micol.
One thing I wish they taught more explicitly in school is the way we see the colors we do *because* they’re the brightest wavelengths emitted from our star.
This understanding was a huge epiphany for me in terms of appreciating our place in the Universe.
For instance, if we had evolved in another solar system, or at another stage in our star’s evolution, we’d see different wavelengths.
Notice the Sun peaks in blue/violet, but after bluer sunlight is scattered by the atmosphere, it transmits in a spectrum we perceive as white.
Deep sea animals, by contrast, usually do not sense red, a very scarce wavelength in their environment, yet have optical organs adapted to perceive bioluminescent light.
Just over a year ago, this investigative report by the Oakland Institute described widespread police brutality inflicted on Kenyan pastoralists by the Northern Rangelands Trust, a “community conservation” charity partnered with The Nature Conservancy.
What this new reporting brings to the limelight is that a huge part of the financing for the scouts and surveillance that enabled this land theft came from selling carbon credits based on the promise that they would make pastoralists practice “regenerative ranching”.
Climate journalism is losing its salience. You can feel it. IPCC reports don’t hit like they used to.
Everybody knows. That’s good, though. So where do we go from here?
This is my suggestion: we have the science and the diplomacy covered. Start covering the ground battles. 🧵
Part of what this means is expanding our idea of what constitutes a climate story. The battle for the Atlanta Forest is the most important and consequential national climate story since Standing Rock. Media have failed to connect it to the climate crisis.
All over the world — the Amazon, the Philippines, the Boreal, the Andes, the Old Growth — every battle for a forest is a climate story. Every wetland, mangrove, reef, and the people protecting them — they’re all climate stories — more consequential than any UN COP or IPCC report.