By: Staff Writer
October 21, 2022
A Bahamian based fisheries researcher shares his experience working on stone crab conservation and how Caribbean stone crabs at large are not at risk, despite seeing the depletion of the Alaskan snow crab, stone crabs don’t have those “pressures.”
Eric Schneider, Research Scientist & Lab Manager at the Island School Cape Eleuthera Institute, told Caribbean Magazine Plus that the Bahamian stone crab is not under any threat like the Alaskan snow crab is. “The Alaskan snow crab is facing different pressures than what Bahamian crabs might be. The pressures on Alaskan crabs are mainly around overfishing and climate change and the Alaskan crabs are more migratory than the stone crab in The Bahamas and every year the Alaskan crabs can travel up to 100 miles where they can move from the locations where they live to the locations where they breed.”
After years of declining numbers, the Alaskan snow crab season is cancelled.
Earlier this month, the Alaska Department of Fish and Game (ADF&G) and National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) announced that due to low stock, crab fisheries aren’t allowed to open for the 2022/2023 season.
Miranda Westphal, a biologist with the state’s fish and game department, told The New York Times that the state is looking into why the crab population was declining.
“From 2018 to 2021, we lost about 90 percent of these animals,” Westphal told the Times.
This makes the study that Mr Schneider led in Eleuthera on the Bahamian stone crab more poignant with the possibility of it yielding significant results for conservation efforts of marine life not just in The Bahamas but the wider Caribbean.
Ground-breaking research on the stone crab fishery in The Bahamas has identified an alternative method for claw removal that increases the chances of stone crab survival by nearly 30 percent once their claw is harvested and the crab is released. This work was done in collaboration with local fishers by the Cape Eleuthera Institute (CEI) at The Island School.
The new method takes advantage of a self-defense strategy that crabs and some other animals use to avoid predators. Have you ever seen a lizard drop its tail off? This may happen when the animal feels threatened, and similarly, crabs can actively drop a claw off to increase their chances of survival if they are under attack. By simply sticking a sharp object into the soft joint mid-way down the claw, a fisher can make the crab drop its claw which avoids damage to the joint that can occur when cracking or clipping the claw off. When a crab drops its claw, survival increases by 29 percent on average, meaning more crabs survive to regrow their claws and reproduce, thus supporting the population and the fishery into the future. Local fishers helped develop the slogan, “Don’t clip the biter, stick it” to communicate the alternate claw removal technique.
Mr Schneider also said: “At this point I’ve spent a pretty good amount of time thinking about the Bahamian stone crab fishery, I know a little bit about it in Florida.
“Stone crabs are distributed through the Caribbean, but I actually don’t really know how big of a fishery, if it’s fishery, in some of the other Caribbean countries.”
He added: “One of the things that we’re interested in, and a lot of the purpose and drive behind this most recent project, was we want to get the fisherman involved at the ground floor, basically.”
Following their initial research, the team met with stone crab fishers, processors, and exporters on Eleuthera, Abaco, Grand Bahama, and New Providence. The research findings were shared with participants, and the research team engaged expert fishers in a discussion to hear their feedback and advice on the feasibility of implementing this different harvest method in the commercial stone crab fishery. The CEI research team asked fishers to try the claw removal method this stone crab season and report back on if it could work on their boats.
The only drawback from de-clawing stone crabs is that it is time consuming, Mr Schneider admitted. Getting fishermen to spend an extra 5 five seconds de-clawing the crabs sensitively would be too much of a burden on their fishing habits, but with training and awareness, fishermen would become accustomed to new harvesting and sustainability techniques.