“As larvae, they are about the same size as the reds were at that age, about the size of the head of a pencil,” says Celeste Leroux, an Alaska Sea Grant graduate student at the University of Alaska Fairbanks.

“These juvenile king crab, they look exactly like the adults, but they are just teenie tiny,” she said. “It's like a miniature world.”

For months now, Leroux has been watching over first the red king crab, and now also the blue king crab larvae at the Alaska King Crab Research and Rehabilitation Program at Seward's Alutiiq Pride Shellfish Hatchery.

The hatchery is owned by the Chugach Regional Resources Commission, a nonprofit Alaska Native organization established in 1984 to address issues of mutual concern of seven member Chugachmiut tribes. These include natural resources, subsistence, the environment and development of culturally appropriate economics projects that promote sustainable development of natural resources in the Chugach region.

The cooperative effort also involves the United Fishermen's Marketing Association, the Aleutian Pribilof Island Community Development Association, the Central Bering Sea Fishermen's Association, the National Marine Fisheries Service, Alaska Department of Fish and Game, City and Borough of Kodiak, and the University of Alaska Fairbanks School of Fisheries and Ocean Sciences.

While researchers are still years away from releasing hatchery-born crab into the wild, the results of the project to date have researchers branching out to answer myriad other questions about the care and feeding of red and blue king crab, to help them survive to adulthood and release into the ocean.

A juvenile red king crab is seen. After drifting near the ocean surface for two to four weeks, the crab settle on the ocean floor as juveniles. This stage of their lives last four to five years. PHOTO/Celeste Leroux/Courtesy Alaska Sea Grant

The research and rehabilitation program is a partnership between university, federal and state scientists, commercial fishermen, coastal communities and the Alaska Native-owned hatchery. The whole focus of the program is to gain the scientific knowledge needed to rebuild Kodiak red king crab and Pribilof blue king crab populations through hatchery enhancement of wild stocks.

Leroux's initial research included feeding the red king crab larvae brine shrimp and several different kinds of algae, all grown at the hatchery. The red king crab have now matured and are feeding on a commercially produced Norwegian copepod, tiny shrimp-like crustaceans normally found in the sea and in fresh-water habitat.

As the red and blue king crab grow, so too do the number of experiments. One of those experiments, for density of living space, will involve determining how many blue king crab larvae per liter of filtered, sterilized sea water, will offer the optimum survival rate. “We're trying 10, 30 and 100 per liter of water,” Leroux said.

Researchers will also experiment on the diet of the larvae, combined with the stress of handling them, to see if handling them at various stages causes higher mortality, Leroux said. Another unanswered question is whether a commercial algae concentrate can be incorporated into the diets of the very young crab.

Researchers also are watching to see if results differ using the commercial algae concentrate and the live algae produced at the hatchery.

“This has big implications in the cost effectiveness of the algae culture,” Leroux explained. “Hatchery-grown algae is more expensive because the cost of producing it is much greater than the cost of buying a bottle of it. We are testing to see if we get the same growth and survival as on hatchery-grown algae.

“We would like to just get them past the most vulnerable stages and then put them into the wild, but exactly how that would be done is still a question for all of us,” she said.

One of the tougher questions to answer is how to realistically tag the young crab when released, since when crab molt they shed their whole shell. At first the very young crab molt every one or two weeks, but as they age they molt less and less frequently.

Stocks of Pribilof and St. Matthew Island blue king crab have been low since the mid-1980s. Commercial fishing for the two Pribilof Island stocks has been closed most recently since 1999.