How Alaska NOAA Head Dr. Robert Foy’s Warning Became a Grim Reality
Spoiler Alert: We Can Bring Back The Crabs!
🌊 Introduction
In the frigid, storm-lashed waters of the Bering Sea, snow and king crabs once supported one of the most productive and valuable fisheries on Earth. For generations, these creatures thrived in a delicate balance of cold temperatures, rich nutrients, and healthy ocean ecosystems.
But beneath the surface, subtle shifts were already unraveling that balance—long before anyone could see the collapse coming.
🔬 The Science Was Clear—And Ignored
“In lower pH environments, juvenile crabs experienced stunted growth, reduced survival, and impaired physiology.” — NOAA Laboratory Findings, early 2010s
More than a decade ago, Dr. Robert Foy and his team at NOAA began sounding the alarm. Their masterful experiments showed without question that ocean acidification—caused by the ocean’s absorption of rising atmospheric CO₂—was disrupting crab development at the most vulnerable stages of life. Blue and red king crab larvae showed poor survival in these ever so slightly more acidic waters.
These findings were not speculative. By the early 2010s, Foy’s team warned that the Bering Sea could begin tipping into crisis by the 2020s.
And then it did.
Between 2018 and 2021, the snow crab population plummeted by over 80%, decreasing from 11.7 billion to 1.9 billion crabs. This sharp decline was primarily attributed to a marine heatwave in 2018–2019, which led to habitat loss, increased metabolic stress, and starvation among the crabs.
2021–2022: Economic Impact Intensifies
In 2021, snow crab numbers crashed—more than a billion crabs simply vanished. The Alaska Department of Fish and Game took the unprecedented step of closing the snow crab fishery for the 2022 season.
The 2021–2022 season had seen a 47% decrease in the value of crab harvested under the Crab Rationalization Program, amounting to a loss of $102.4 million. This downturn was mainly due to significant reductions in the total allowable catch for both Bering Sea snow crab and Bristol Bay red king crab fisheries. Sustainable Fisheries UW+2NOAA Fisheries+2Alaska Beacon+2
2022–2023: Unprecedented Fishery Closures
In a historic move, Alaska canceled the snow crab season for the first time ever in 2022–2023, following an 87% drop in population from 8 billion in 2018 to 1 billion in 2021. The red king crab fishery also remained closed for the second consecutive year. These closures resulted in a 100% revenue loss for the snow crab fishery, equating to approximately $133 million in ex-vessel value and $171 million in wholesale revenue.
🧊 A Fishery Vanishes But It Was No Mystery
The headlines focused on warming seas and marine heatwaves—but scientists quietly pointed to acidification as an invisible, but no less deadly, co-driver.
🌱 Plankton: The Ocean’s First Line of Defense
“The collapse of crab populations wasn’t just a simple chemical reaction; it was a cascading failure of the ocean’s ecological foundation.”
Ocean acidification is more than a chemical issue—it’s an ecological systems crisis. And the system starts with plankton.
Phytoplankton, the tiny photosynthetic organisms that fuel the entire marine food web, also regulate carbon. Healthy plankton pastures remove CO₂ from both water and air, helping maintain ocean pH. But warming, pollution, and loss of nutrients are killing these critical plankton blooms.
Without these vibrant pastures, the ocean loses its ability to resist acidification—and marine life from crabs to whales feels the effect.
🤫 What Happened to Dr. Foy’s Message?
Ironically, today Dr. Robert Foy is the Director of NOAA’s Alaska Fisheries Science Center. But his public statements no longer feature his landmark work on acidification and crabs and his near perfect prophecy of their doom.
Instead, NOAA’s narrative has shifted to a vague “climate change” ocean “warm blob” explanation, obscuring the clear, testable cause-and-effect chain that Foy once helped reveal. When scientist Foy let the data do the talking the doomsday scenario the crabs face is clear, when bureaucrat boss Foy does the talking its a different story.
“Blaming climate change in general avoids responsibility. Restoring ocean biology—especially plankton pastures—is our last and best defense.”
🌍 The Science Is In: We Have the Knowledge and the Means to Restore Ocean Pastures Now
“Like turning off a nutrient tap, the slowing dust storms of the late 20th century left entire ocean basins gasping for vital iron.” — Martinez-Garcia, Nature (2011)
The catastrophic collapse of the Bering Sea’s crab populations wasn’t just a coincidence of warming waters and “climate change.” It was the predictable result of a decades-long decline in vital aeolian (wind-blown) dust—and with it, the loss of iron that once nourished the North Pacific’s ocean pastures.
Read this post “Understanding the cause of ocean and fisheries collapse” https://opralaska.com/?p=526
Ocean Pasture Restoration Now
We simply cannot do any form of chemistry to neutralize oceans growing acidic content, there are not the billions of tons of antacid tums tablets to cure Mother Oceans heartburn, similarly we simply cannot staunch the flow of humanities fossil-fueled CO2 into the air and ocean in the immediate time frame that the dying acidic ocean needs YESTERDAY!
What we can do using proven nature-based methods, immediately replenish and restore the vital ocean pastures and in doing so restore the natural health, abundance, and resiliance of our Bering Sea ocean pastures.
Starting in the 1950s and accelerating through the 1960s, Asian dust storms declined by over 80%, driven largely by rising atmospheric CO₂ fertilizing grasslands in China and Central Asia. With more grass came less dust. And with less dust came starving plankton, collapsing fish stocks, and ocean deserts where once there were life-rich seas.
“Sardines didn’t vanish because we fished too hard—they vanished because we didn’t notice their pasture was dying beneath them.” — Chavez, Progress in Oceanography (2003)
For more than 35 years, hundreds of millions of dollars have been invested in public and private ocean iron replenishment research, including major field trials from the U.S., Japan, Canada, Germany, the EU, and independent organizations. These studies have proven again and again that replenishing just a few tonnes of iron-rich dust can restore plankton blooms across tens of thousands of square kilometers of ocean, reviving the marine food web from the bottom up.
This is not speculative science—it’s tested, measurable, and ready for deployment. And most importantly, it is nature-based. We aren’t inventing something new—we’re simply restoring the natural mineral cycle that human activity interrupted.
By reintroducing trace mineral dust into these barren ocean regions, we can immediately restore the plankton pastures that once supported massive populations of crabs, salmon, cod, sardines, and the seabirds and whales that fed on them.
Ocean pasture restoration is the most practical, fast-acting, and scalable tool we have to reverse marine ecosystem collapse and remove legacy atmospheric CO₂.
🐟 The Failure of Maximum Sustainable Yield (MSY) and the Need for Ocean Pasture Management
Historically, fisheries management has focused on maximum allowable catch, relying on the flawed model of Maximum Sustainable Yield (MSY). This approach fails to consider the declining productivity of ocean ecosystems and has led to devastating overharvesting even as marine habitats wither.
“Managing fisheries without managing their pastures is like raising cattle while ignoring the grasslands.” — Ware & Thomson, Science (2005)
Today, as multiple fisheries collapse, we must replace MSY with Ecosystem-Based Fisheries Management (EBFM)—a model that prioritizes the health of the ocean pastures themselves.
By restoring ocean productivity through nature-based iron replenishment, we can rebuild marine food webs, sustain biodiversity, and ensure long-term resilience. This approach mirrors successful terrestrial pasture management, which focuses not on maximum extraction but on maintaining the carrying capacity of the land.
It’s time ocean management caught up.
✅ What Must Be Done – WE CAN BRING BACK THE CRABS
- Declare an Ocean and Fisheries Emergency at local, state, and national levels so that we can respond to this true emergency with redirection of existing resources immediately and not via some endless legislative and academic debating exercise in moving through a quagmire. Read more on this emergency at this link https://opralaska.com/?p=504
- Restore plankton pastures through proven targeted replenishment of Mother Nature’s missing mineral dust
- Recognize ocean acidification and dust decline as a primary, reversible drivers of marine collapse
- Move beyond MSY toward full ecosystem and habitat-based marine management
- Deploy ready-to-scale ocean iron replenishment, proven over decades of international study
📚 References & Further Reading
- Hurst, T.P. et al. (2012). Effects of ocean acidification on juvenile red king and Tanner crab. PLOS ONE.
- Martin, J.H. (1990). Glacial-interglacial CO₂ change: The iron hypothesis. Paleoceanography.
- Martinez-Garcia et al. (2011). Dust-climate coupling in glacial North Pacific. Nature.
- Boyd et al. (2007). Mesoscale Iron Enrichment Experiments. Science.
- Moore et al. (2013). Natural iron fertilization is not enough. Nature Geoscience.
- Chavez et al. (2003). Sardine collapse and the plankton connection. Progress in Oceanography.
- George, R. (2014). Pacific Carbon Restoration.
- KMXT.org (2024). Alaska organization wants to renew ocean pastures
📣 Share This Post
“It’s not just about emissions—it’s about the missing plankton, the unraveling food web, and the silent acidification of the seas.”
Use hashtags:
#OceanRestoration #CrabCollapse #PlanktonPastures #BringBackTheCrabs #NatureBasedSolutions #DustMatters