California’s fish and wildlife director has announced he will close the commercial crab season south of Mendocino County on May 15, six weeks early, to prevent potential entanglements of endangered whales and other marine creatures, including sea turtles.
The early closure was formalized Wednesday, one week after Chuck Bonham, head of the state fish and wildlife agency, issued a preliminary determination declaring his plans. It deprives commercial crabbers of the final weeks of a season already truncated by a one-month delay that pushed its start well into December. The season normally closes June 30.
But under the terms of a legal settlement reached last spring between Bonham and the Center for Biological Diversity, the presumptive season end was April 1 this year.
So Bonham, who has been advised by a long-standing working group that includes commercial crabbers and which meets periodically to assess entanglement risk, already has let the season run longer than he might have.
Still, the news has upset many in the commercial fishing fleet who are having a difficult time finding markets for their product, given the mass closure of restaurants and disruption of trade due to the coronavirus pandemic.
They noted that there is limited crab gear in the water along the affected stretch of coast this late in the season, as many commercial fishermen and women prepare to launch for salmon May 1. The sporadic movement of blue and humpback whale is just beginning through coastal feeding grounds, some said, making the threat of entanglement low.
“The risk of crab fishing gear harming endangered whales is statistically insignificant because of low concentrations of whales, as well as the relatively small amounts of gear being deployed,” Crescent City fisherman Ben Platt, president of the California Coast Crab Association, said in a written statement. “In fact, there have been no confirmed interactions between commercial Dungeness crab gear and any whales during the current crab season.”
However, Ryan Bartling, senior environmental scientist with the state wildlife agency, said as long as there are gear and whales in the water, the risk is there.
“Whales move around,” Bartling said. “We do know we’ve had entanglements this time of year, and the whales are back, and the director has to make hard decisions.”
The state’s intervention comes under a legal deal hashed out between environmentalists, crabbing interests and state regulators after a major spike in fatal whale entanglements off the West Coast, beginning in 2014 and peaking in 2015 and 2016. Though not all cases involved commercial crabbing gear, many did.
In October 2017, on the eve of the autumn crab season, the Center for Biological Diversity filed suit against Bonham, claiming his agency’s management of the commercial crab fishery had allowed for unauthorized capture and killing of threatened and endangered humpback whales, endangered blue whales, and endangered Pacific leatherback sea turtles without possession of an incidental take permit under the Endangered Species Act.
As an alternative to protracted litigation or closing the fishery while the agency pursues a permit and develops a required habitat conservation plan, the parties settled on a plan to regulate the fishery based on close, almost real-time assessment of whale migrations and fishing activity to determine the risk of entanglement. Because of feeding and migratory patterns, that risk is deemed highest in the spring.
But the season got started late last fall because of concern about gear and whale interaction at that time. As April 1 approached, it was allowed to continue because factors suggested the threat remained minor.
And to most members of the working group, it did not seem any worse two weeks later, said Bodega Bay fisherman Dick Ogg, an original task force member.
But Ogg said one additional consideration was the need to allow extra time for crabbing crews to remove gear from the water this spring, due to rough seas in the forecast and the difficulty of physical distancing efforts aboard a small vessel.
In addition, Bartling said, the incremental increases in blue and humpback whales on the coast north and south of San Francisco Bay even over a week or two means that prolonging the season any longer would only heighten entanglement risk.
“It’s a tough one,” said Ogg, who believes that risk to be low.
“The department, like I said, they’re trying to err on the conservative side and understandably so,” he said. “But still, it’s difficult for the fishermen. There are guys who need this.”
You can reach Staff Writer Mary Callahan at 707-521-5249 or mary.callahan@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter @MaryCallahanB.
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