Why Ten Billion Snow Crabs Disappeared Off the Coast of Alaska

www.smithsonianmag.com

The unprecedented die-off represents roughly 90 percent of the eastern Bering Sea population

29 comments

Peter Watts (SciFi author) has a phrase: 'Signposts en route to oblivion'
Hey look, this is one such signpost
- Majority of humanity sitting in the passenger seat staring at their phones: ..... Huh, wah? .... Oh, ok ... goes back to looking at phone
  
  More like majority of humanity is like "oh shit, we should stop there's no road ahead!" And the driver is just like "nah"
  
  What should i do? Stop eating crab? Its about 20 years too late for that, as ive never eaten crab.
  Short of devouring the rich, which im only stopped by lack of a ride and a barbed wire fence, or eco-terrorism which for legal reasons i have to clarify that i do not support and have, like totally never engaged in, theres not much i can do.
  My carbon footprint is so shallow that it might as well be flying. Yet the world still burns.
Hmm
Toss it on the pile of horrible signs of things to come.
- We can use them to warm us and cook each other for food as the last humans die out, neato.
- There are many factors that play into that.
  First off each female can produce 100,000 eggs per year. So even thos a 90% decline in numbers sounds horrendous, the population numbers can be replaced quickly.
  It takes 5-8 years for the crabs to reach full maturity and start reproducing. Harvest size for the males is 7-9 years.
  So on first look you think around 8 years for the population to recover.
  However in nature something tends to fill the vacuum left by the decrease of a population. Other species who compete with the crabs for food increase in numbers.
  Then there is the die off of predators that relied on the crab as a food source. This might allow the crab population to increase faster than normal.
  There is also the increase of predators that feed on the species replacing the crab. Supressing the competition to the crabs.
  Each of these species has their own lifecycles and timing.
  So the bottom line, it could take 6 years or 600 years. We don't know.
  
  They probably lay 100.000 eggs because only 100 make it into adulthood and the others don't hatch, get eaten, sick or starve before...
- Never; they'll go extinct with all (including us the people).
i ate those food
Maybe Charles Darwin was wrong. Perhaps it's not about being 'fit'
- To be clear, being fit in this case refers to a species being best suited for their specific environment. So a species beginning to die off because the environment they adapted to over a very long time was suddenly and drastically changed makes perfect sense.
  What exactly aren't you getting here?
- Tell me you have no understanding of the theory of evolution without telling me you have no understanding of the theory of evolution...
  
  perhaps it's about having your habitat destroyed by climate change
- this is what i was originally getting at, now I'm critiquing Darwin because that's what science is all about