My preferred way of buying them is from a restaurant, delivered cooked on my plate.
But yes, dungeness crab is awesome.
I can see the appeal. I’m always a little sad when I kill them. (But I do get to use my nice cleaver (and a rubber mallet).) But it’s nice to eat them at home, with some corn on the cob.
This would make me crab-bee.
I’m afraid to go to sleep for fear of dreaming about a hive of eight-legged horny pinchers. Ugh! And think of the honey!
Maybe the crabs just evolved a little common sense and realized it was a bad idea to be off the shore of Alaska during crab season. They could all just be laying low in Hawaii.
This could be an interesting development to watch. females can carry up to 150,000 eggs. It would make it a good candidate for evolutionary adaptation within our life time.
If they learned to hang with (and breed with) the coconut crabs common in the South Pacific we’d really be in for a treat.
Helpful hint to arthrophobes: do NOT google or wiki anything related to coconut crabs. You do not want to know.
How do the crabs know where to go? Ocean currents? Ocean temp? Maybe something changed this year that caused their migration to move and we just haven’t found them yet?
Some years, the lake near our house is full of migratory birds in the fall. Some years they don’t show up. No idea why. Are crabs any different?
You know, it’s good for the crabs they skedaddled. Otherwise they could be in hot water.
You! Out of the pool! 
It’s not THAT hard to ascertain general changes in population through sampling. By looking at the density of the population of animals in places they should be expected to be found, you can get a pretty good idea. I think anyone can guess “A billion crabs are missing” is a conveniently round number that is probably not specifically accurate; it could be hundreds of millions on either side. What is for sure is most of them are gone. They didn’t move to a different place this year.
This reminds me of the moratoriums (moratoria?) that had to be placed on cod fishing a few decades back. The fishermen complained, but as a friend of mine put it, you can put a moratorium on it or wait a few years for the fish to erect their own moratorium, which is called “no more fish.”
Whether this moratorium will work, I dunno. The cod moratorium certainly did, but every species is different and WHY the snow crab is vanishing matters too - is it just over-harvesting, or is climate change affecting them?
The loss of edible ocean life is a huge concern, and has been for years. We’re going to drive the bluefin tuna to extinction soon and they’re the tip of a scary iceberg.
XKCD has something interesting and scary to say about ships & fish: Ships (xkcd.com)
Well, it worked in the sense of getting cod populations back up to levels that were commercially viable for fisheries, especially with changes to fishing regulations on equipment and catch sizes to prevent crazy overfishing again. But the cod population will probably never be back to where it was 100 years ago.
Or for that matter 400-500 years ago, when ships could catch them by just lowering big buckets into the water.
The 1990s moratorium on cod fishing devastated the economy of Atlantic Canada, especially Newfoundland. Newfoundland didn’t, and doesn’t, have a very large or developed economy, and there’s not many people living there, so when something like one fifth of the private sector was laid off in one shot, it was a crushing blow. Years of “pull all the cod out of the sea” resulted in massive social upheaval and devastation of people’s lives, but what else was there to do? Had they more intelligently managed the industry decades before none of that would have happened.
All of this will now be replicated in Alaska. It won’t be quite AS devastating, because the snow crab industry isn’t proportionally as important to Alaska as cod was to Newfoundland, but it won’t be good.
Fishery management is an absolute textbook example of where a government must intervene in the economy. Even for a hard core free marketer like me, this is about as slam-dunk an example of a common resource fraught with negative externalities as you can possibly imagine. It’s Market Failure 101. Without government control, the cod - or the snow crabs, or halibut, or tuna, or anything - will be fished to extinction.
How thorough is the sampling? The snow crab habitat in the Bering sea is like twice the size of Alaska. Wouldn’t you need the entire Pacific crab fleet to adequately sample the area?
I saw live king crabs at an Asian grocery store. They were huge and really quite creepy. I can’t believe I didn’t take a photo.
The Pacific states have put pretty firm controls (which is why not that common in stores) and the crab isn’t that far out or deep, so no North Korean, etc bandit fishing boats. The Population is okay, but could be better.
Yep.
That’s what Herman Melville suggested about whale populations in 1851.
Melville’s complacency about the resiliency of whale populations was not justified by events.
I learned by reading the comments on news stories that this is all a government lie to make more people be under government control. Wake up Sheeple!
This was my thinking, they can also go much deeper than they could possibly be fished. I am a little concerned also about some of the fish species that feed on the snow crabs, such as halibut. I wonder if it will have any effect on their populations.