Population Decline
In 1980, at the peak of the king crab industry, Alaskan fisheries produced 200 million pounds of crab. However, by 1983 the total size of the catch had dropped to less than 10% of this size. Several theories for the precipitous drop in the crab population have been proposed including overfishing, warmer waters, and increased fish predation. The slow harvest forced many fishermen to diversify and catch snow crabs (such as bairdi (tanner) crab and snow crab) or cod. In recent years strict regulations have been enforced in order to responsibly manage the populations and allow them to rebound. The red and blue king crab population has stayed relatively low in almost all areas except Southeast Alaska since 1983, forcing many fishermen to concentrate on the golden king crab.
Read more about this topic: Alaskan King Crab Fishing
Famous quotes containing the words population and/or decline:
“It was a time of madness, the sort of mad-hysteria that always presages war. There seems to be nothing left but war—when any population in any sort of a nation gets violently angry, civilization falls down and religion forsakes its hold on the consciences of human kind in such times of public madness.”
—Rebecca Latimer Felton (1835–1930)
“Where mass opinion dominates the government, there is a morbid derangement of the true functions of power. The derangement brings about the enfeeblement, verging on paralysis, of the capacity to govern. This breakdown in the constitutional order is the cause of the precipitate and catastrophic decline of Western society. It may, if it cannot be arrested and reversed, bring about the fall of the West.”
—Walter Lippmann (1889–1974)