Deckhands aboard the crab boat Arctic Hunter in the Bering Sea off Alaska separate male and female snow crab on March 21, 2013. - Steve Ringman/The Seattle Times/TNS
SEATTLE — Rewind, for just a second, to 2018 and imagine a series of nets trawling the depths of the east Bering Sea. Most every year, scientists with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration look for snow crabs. They drop nets for half an hour across 400 different spots in the sea. They haul in and weigh their catch and then calculate a rough number of snow crabs in the area. For that particular year, those scientists estimated 11 billion crabs were living, crawling, eating and reproducing in the frigid waters below, said Cody Szuwalski, a fishery biologist at NOAA. They had never ...
