Unalaska, AK – The Alaska Department of Fish and Game recently set guideline harvest levels for the small open access tanner crab fishery near Unalaska. Unalaska Bay will not be open for commercial fishing this year, but Makushin and Akutan Bays will. ADF&G bases their decision on the annual trawl survey in the Eastern Aleutian District. The survey results showed that the mature male abundance of the stock in Unalaska Bay was too low to open the fishery. It was down 98 percent from last year and is at its lowest level since 1995. Assistant Area Shellfish Biologist Jeanette Alas says this does not mean that the local stock is crashing, simply that the survey results were low for this year
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"With the trawl survey, we're limited depending on the bottom where we can tow. So we can only tow in certain areas. So on that day, on that hour that we towed in the survey area, if there weren't crab there right then it reflects poorly in the survey. But these are pretty small local populations. We definitely worry about depleting local resources, so we tend to manage these fisheries fairly conservatively," she explained.

Alas said the trawl surveys are they best method because, by sampling all of the crab, they get a picture of the overall health of the tanner crab stock, not just the number of harvestable males.

"If you just use fisheries results, if you just base it on legal males that are retained and harvested each season, you don't know what the reproductive condition of the stock is," she said. "If the females or the pre-recruits are dropping that means in a couple of years there could be some problems if pre-recruits have dropped considerably. They may not be able to essentially replenish themselves. So you want an idea not just of the stock of crab that's available to harvest but of the whole stock because obviously once you harvest the legal size ones you want to be able to replace those."

Unalaska Bay was open for fishing last year, but Makushin Bay was not. This year, Makushin Bay and Akutan Bay will each open with the minimum guideline harvest level of 35,000 pounds. In Makushin Bay the mature male abundance increased 61 percent from the 2009 survey. The abundance decreased in Akutan Bay by 24 percent.

The local tanner crab fishery will open on January 15. About 10 vessels participate in the district each year. The value of the fishery is confidential because only one processor participated.