Climate change could be to blame for the disappearance of billions of crabs in Alaska

Billions of crabs have disappeared from the Bering Sea near Alaska since 2022. While it might seem easy to blame the extinction on overfishing, scientists say that wasn’t the cause at all. Instead, climate change is more likely to blame for the crabs’ sudden disappearance. Unfortunately, the news doesn’t get much better from there, as the reason the crabs are disappearing seems to be that they’ve starved to death.

More specifically, scientists believe that warmer water in the Bering Sea near Alaska, something caused by ongoing climate change issues, has caused the crabs’ metabolism to go into turbo mode. Then they couldn’t keep up with their metabolic needs and starved to death.

This is obviously a very gruesome death, and the sad truth is that scientists believe that the crabs that went extinct were probably caused by human-caused climate change. The Bering Sea ecosystem has changed quite a bit in recent decades as global temperatures have continued to rise. And while rising sea levels continue to be a problem for people living on the coast, warming waters are also a problem for the sea life that calls these bodies of water home.

Marine heat waves that hit in years like 2018 and 2019 would have been particularly deadly for the crabs. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reported (via CNN) that the Bering Sea is experiencing warmer, ice-free conditions more oftenand when those warmer waters push through, aquatic animals often struggle to survive the changes.

And these disappearing crabs are not worthless. The industry around them generates more than $227 million a year, according to a study published this week. And that means the industry will have to adapt to how these waters warm, especially if global temperatures continue to rise as they have.

Additionally, as these warmer waters move into the cooler regions where the crabs call home, they also fall prey to other species of marine animals that move with the warmer waters. It is creating a vicious circle that we are not likely to find a solution for soon.