Hatchery plan aimed to rebuild Kodiak king crab stocks

CANADA - A new plan to breed red king crab in captivity and eventually release them into the wild is projected by federal biologists as a possible answer to rebuild Kodiak king crab stocks.

If successful, the project could eventually boost lucrative crab harvests, echoing the late 1970s, when Kodiak itself became the center of a crab fishing bonanza, and fishermen harvested millions pounds of crab worth millions of dollars.

The boom in crab fishing, which reached 130 million pounds worth about $115 million in 1980, went bust by 1982, when crab stocks collapsed. Decades of fishing restrictions that followed have failed to increase crab populations to anything close to what they were in their heyday.

Source: Alaska Journal