Unalaska, AK – Once pollock B season kicks into gear, trawlers might want to pay closer attention to their crab bycatch. The Alaska Department of Fish and Game, the National Marine Fisheries Service, and the Marine Conservation Alliance have teamed up to tag both opilio and red king crab, and they're now looking to collect those markers.

The groups are offering an award of $200 for archival tags, which include information like the depth the crab was found at and what the water temperature was. They're also offering hats for the standard spaghetti tags.

MCA President Anne Vanderhoeven says that the tags are important to recover.

"They're expensive tags, and they contain a lot of information," she says.

About 400 crabs in the Bering Sea have been tagged. The set of red king crabs were tagged and released in 2009 in Bristol Bay, and the opies were tagged on fishing ground in 2010 and 2011. The research group is hoping to try to recover most of these tags this year before the crabs molt and lose the tags next summer.

Once the tags are recovered, the data they contain will be used to inform stock assessments.

"It helps [ADFG researchers] understand crab migration," says Vanderhoeven. "In understanding that better, they can do a better, more accurate crab stock assessments which are used to determine what a safe harvest level is for those species of crab."

Crab tags can be returned to observers or the ADFG office.