Staff from the Alaska Fisheries Science Center in Seattle, a branch of NOAA's National Marine Fisheries Service, recommended at a mid-May meeting of the North Pacific Fishery Management Council's crab plan team that harvest limits for the coming season be set at 16 million pounds, down from 58.5 million pounds last year.

Council staff is expected to present its report to the council at an early June meeting in Anchorage. The council will use that information, plus recommendations from its scientific and statistical committee and a summer trawl survey of current stocks, to decide in October at Anchorage on the total allowable catch for the coming season.

Gretchen Harrington, a fishery management plan coordinator for NOAA Fisheries in Juneau, said that under regulations set out by the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act the Secretary of Commerce is mandated to take measures to rebuild snow crab stocks within 10 years of when the rebuilding plan was put into place in 2000.

The goal is to rebuild the biomass maximum sustainable yield - the level that would produce good long-term returns - to 317.7 million pounds. Last year federal fisheries managers estimated the biomass at 260.1 million pounds, Harrington said.

Wayne Donaldson, regional management biologist at Kodiak for the Alaska Department of Fish and Game, said AFSC's Jack Turnock proposed the drastic reduction in allowable harvest based on a snow crab model that indicated such cuts were necessary to meet the rebuilding deadline.

In 1999, snow crab stocks in the Bering Sea went through a precipitous decline, Donaldson said.

"We went from roughly 290 million pounds to 25 million pounds the next year, so National Marine Fisheries Service was ordered to devise a rebuilding plan with a time frame of 10 years."

Turnock's model measures how to get back to that maximum sustainable yield, Donaldson said.

"He projected that at the present level of fishing we would not get to the rebuilding level in the time specified. His model will be updated with new survey information this summer," he said. "That information will go into the model and it will be recalculated, so it is too early to see what the results will be yet."

Based on the 2008 information, it would suggest a large reduction in the allowable harvest is needed to meet the rebuilding goal, he said.

Herman Savikko, with the Alaska Department of Fish and Game in Juneau, serves on the crab plan team with Harrington, Turnock and Donaldson.

Savikko said the health of the snow crab population could indicate a harvest of about 60 million pounds again this year, but that would not fit in with the rebuilding goal, so the state will ask federal fisheries officials for clarification on the rules.