By Margaret Bauman
Alaska Journal of Commerce

A new state fisheries report says an estimated 5.8 million red king crab - including some 677,000 legal male red king crab - were discarded during the first season the fishery was privatized.

The highest previous discard rate of legal males, from 1999 through 2004, were 80,000 crab in the 2002 season, said Alaska Department of Fish and Game biologists Doug Pengilly and David Barnhard.

The other discarded crab were females and males too small - called 'sub-legal' - to be legally harvested.

The report lent credence to growing concerns of high-grading, the practice of retaining new-shell crab for processing, which is likely to garner a higher price in the marketplace.

"It is something we haven't had to deal with in this fishery before, because it hadn't occurred before," Pengilly said.

"We started getting some hints of this developing in the community development quota fishery in the last couple of years," he said. "This year, 19 to 20 percent of the legal male king crab caught were not kept."

Pengilly said that while nobody knows with certainty the mortality rate of discarded crab, the state assumes 20 percent mortality from handling and discard.

The current harvest strategy was developed assuming that the incidental catch would be of non-legal (sub-legal male and female) crab, "and now we are working with a harvest strategy that didn't anticipate this (discarding of legal males)," Pengilly said.

"Right now the issue is to determine if this is something we are going to be looking at next year. And if this is the way business is done, we would have to re-evaluate the harvest strategy," he said.

Representing the crab fishing industry, the Pacific Northwest Crab Industry Advisory Committee, meeting in Edmonds, Wash., on May 23, urged several voluntary solutions to improve retention of legal male crab to the level of fisheries from 1999 through 2004.

Their proposed tactics include a commitment from all participants on retention goals, encouraging development of new king crab markets and encouraging fleet communication on the fishing grounds in an effort to avoid old-shell crab areas, when possible.

The advisory committee also sought solutions to reduce incidental catch of female and sub-legal king crab with several measures, including a commitment from all fishery participants to reduce the rate of incidental catch. One of those recommendations included use of discard decal placards to educate deck men on the need to carefully return all discarded crab to the sea.

Under the so-called federal crab rationalization program, which privatized the crab fisheries, vessels qualified for quota shares are allocated a percentage of the total allowable harvest, based on their history in the fishery.

Proponents of crab rationalization argued that the new program would eliminate the potentially deadly race for crab on the high seas because each vessel had a guaranteed harvest to be taken at its own pace. Fishermen who harvested during the first season of crab rationalization said it didn't work out that way because market demands brought deadlines on fishers from processors.

Crab rationalization has also received sharp criticism from a number of residents of coastal communities because the new program allowed owners of quota shares the option to stack all their quotas on a single vessel, rather than on several vessels they owned or to simply lease out their quota shares. The practice of stacking resulted in a greatly reduced number of jobs for skippers and crews. A number of businesses also were adversely affected because vessel owners needed fewer supplies and services, according to community leaders.

University of Alaska Anchorage economist Gunnar Knapp, who did preliminary studies on the economic effects of crab rationalization on several communities, said it was still too early to tell what the long-term effect would be.

Knapp's study did not delve into any problems associated with high-grading. Some fishermen acknowledged, however, that high-grading was prevalent in their industry.

Pengilly said there is no regulation against discarding legal male king crab, and questioned how such a regulation could be practically enforced.

The practice of high-grading poses problems for fishery managers, he said. "If you are not keeping 20 percent of legal males you catch, it takes that much longer to take the total allowable catch," he said. The longer the fishing continues, the more incidental catch of sub-legal males and females occurs, plus more legal males that are discarded die, he said.

Accommodating such practices, if they continue, could mean lowering the total allowable catch, he said. A lower allowable harvest would subsequently result in each participating vessel being allocated less crab.

"The industry knows it has a problem here and they are trying to address it," Pengilly said.

The Alaska Marine Conservation Council said the North Pacific Fishery Management Council, the federal body that designed crab rationalization, should take a different approach to its proposed rationalization program for groundfish in the Gulf of Alaska to avoid similar problems. AMCC program director Dorothy Childers said many people were not surprised that high-grading was happening, but that she was surprised at the magnitude of the practice.

"The red king crab experience shows that slowing down the race for fish is not a guarantee that conservation will improve," Childers said. "This is an important lesson that should convince fishery managers to spend as much time building conservation components into the groundfish program as they do allocating the wealth."

While the Bering Sea red king crab fishery looks good right now, with an allowable catch last year of 18.3 million pounds, it is nowhere near the harvests of the 1980s, Pengilly said.

In 1980, the commercial fleet harvested a massive 130 million pounds of red king crab. The harvest fell to 34 million pounds in 1981, and 3 million pounds in 1982, before the fishery was shut down in 1983, Pengilly said. The fishery reopened between 1983 and 1993, but was closed down again from 1994 through 1995, he said.

Margaret Bauman can be reached at margie.bauman@alaskajournal.com.