Dungeness are WA’s most lucrative seafood, but we know little about them

ABOARD THE NICOLE C, Salish Sea – Dom Wilbur slammed the knife into the frozen squid, sending shattered ice flying. Nearby stacks of crab pots teetered as his dad throttled the boat past the Skagit River delta and carved deeper into the fog.

As the salty mist enveloped the deck, Dom Wilbur and his cousin Alex Stewart heaved empty pots and stuffed bait traps with the squid and chum salmon.

“Go ahead, boys,” J.J. Wilbur called out from the rear cab window.

Dom Wilbur and Stewart tossed the buoy off the side of the boat, followed by the splash of a 65-pound pot. They would repeat this dance dozens of times on a late June afternoon, and haul up a bounty of Dungeness before sunset.

For decades, this crab has helped sustain Washington fishing communities, averaging an annual harvest of 23.3 million pounds over the past 10 years. The nontreaty/state harvest alone was worth an average of $63 million.

Even so, relatively little is known about this native species and how future conditions might affect its abundance. This is especially true in Puget Sound. It is unlike the well-known Pacific salmon. Now as climate change threatens marine life all over the Northwest, work is underway from the coast to the Salish Sea to figure out how Dungeness might fare.

The stakes are high. The Dungeness South Sound fishery has remained closed since 2018. It was never a large fishery compared to other areas in the Puget Sound, but it is still largely unclear why the crab disappeared. Should this happen elsewhere the effects could be devastating.

Lorraine Loomis, the late Swinomish leader who helped shape modern fisheries management, in 2018 asked Swinomish biologists to learn more about Dungeness, setting into motion a collaboration among scientists, fisheries managers and community members that is leading research efforts.

“South Sound was the warning flag, I think, for many managers,” said Emily Buckner, Dungeness crab research manager for Puget Sound Restoration Fund and the program coordinator for the crab research group. “We’ve been managing crab in this size, sex, season, kind of management strategy pretty successfully, and then it didn’t work here.”

To be sure, the South Sound’s decline doesn’t mean the crab fishery is in trouble. There are places where it’s doing great. But the effects of climate change on shellfish have become more apparent since fishers sounded the alarm after hoisting up crab pots with dead or suffocating crab off the coast of Oregon more than two decades ago.

Low-oxygen conditions off the Pacific Northwest coast that can stress or kill crab are becoming more frequent, alongside ocean acidification that affects shell development and can damage the shell material.

Researchers are monitoring crab at their earliest life stages and gathering abundance and genomic data to better understand how climate change and other environmental factors may be affecting the populations. They are collecting data they hope can help develop tools to forecast crab abundance.

The goal is to keep the fishery sustainable long into the future.

“More than anything, fishing is a way of life for us here at Swinomish,” said J.J. Wilbur, a Swinomish senator and Loomis’ nephew. “We’d like to really continue that way of life for the next generation and generations to come. With resources dwindling, potentially my great-grandchildren wouldn’t be able to do the things that I’ve been able to do and that scares me, so I try to stay active and advocate for our natural resources.”

Fishery booms

For millennia, clams, crab, salmon and other marine life have nourished generations of Coast Salish people.

“As a people we are connected to the saltwater and the rivers and the fish and the resources here at Swinomish,” J.J. Wilbur said. “Our people have relied on them for thousands of years. And so it really is culturally important to us. It’s not just about the financial aspect of it.”

J.J. Wilbur recalled his aunt Loomis growing up seining for humpies, or pink salmon, or clam digging near Lone Tree Point. As kids, she and her siblings relied on seafood as a main staple at their table.

Her family further instilled in her the need to preserve it for future generations, something that would guide her through decades of work to recover and preserve natural resources.

“When the salmon started declining, we could no longer put food on the table for our families,” J.J. Wilbur said. “That’s when everybody started crabbing.”

J.J. Wilbur, his uncle Doug Wilbur and Dave Johnston, another Swinomish citizen, were some of the first Swinomish commercial Dungeness fishermen to crab off reservation in the early 1990s.

They bought a 24-foot aluminum skiff and cleaned up 150 pots that a friend had recovered from a thorny tangle of blackberry bushes in his yard.

By the early 2000s, Wilbur said, Dungeness became central to the livelihoods of Swinomish and other tribal nations’ commercial fishers. Crabbing in Puget Sound has gradually grown to an average annual harvest of about 7 million pounds over the past decade.

In 1994, the Rafeedie decision affirmed tribal nations’ treaty-guaranteed right to harvest shellfish in their usual and accustomed areas. It launched a system of collaborative shellfish harvest management between tribal and state officials.

In Puget Sound, state and tribal co-managers open the fishery after shell condition testing finds 80% of the harvestable crab have hard shells or after season opening dates. Fisheries begin in the spring and continue until quotas are met – half going to tribal fishers and half to the state – or when the defined harvest season has ended.

On the Nicole C in late June, a crane heaved four garbage cans full to the brim with burgundy Dungeness ashore. Crab scurried atop each others’ shells.

“What’s it say, Al?” J.J. Wilbur called out to his nephew, who was watching the numbers on the scale.

A catch of 789 pounds would go to the seafood buyers waiting on the One Ocean dock in La Conner, Washington.

Back when Wilbur started crabbing, $1.25 a pound was a great price and they would often haul in a few thousand pounds of crab each day, he said. In June, the buyers were offering $7 a pound.

Seafood buyers report their purchases with tribal and state co-managers within 24 hours. Harvest performance is the primary data used to establish catch limits each year. And that represents a wide knowledge gap for a fishery relied upon by so many.

Because there is no biological monitoring of Dungeness crab populations in Puget Sound, Loomis wrote in 2017, there is no accurate estimate of how much crab there is in the wild.

“We think this lack of knowledge requires a more careful approach to managing the resource,” wrote Loomis, also known by her traditional name ʔitəkʷbixʷ (which sounds like e-tock-wa-bue).

Loomis told Swinomish staff to figure out answers to many of the questions revolving around Salish Sea Dungeness crab fishery.

Swinomish biologists soon realized many of these questions were too big to be addressed without collaboration, and teamed up with Lummi and the University of Washington to organize the first meeting in 2018. It was attended by more than two dozen fisheries managers, biologists, academics and government employees from across the Pacific Northwest.

The group, known as the Pacific Northwest Crab Research Group, is collecting data across the Salish Sea and outer coast.

“There must have been a pent-up need for this,” said Sarah Grossman, a shellfish biologist with the Swinomish Tribe, recalling those first packed, fast-paced meetings.

Robust until it wasn’t

In traps across the Salish Sea and outer coast, researchers are catching and counting larval crab, no bigger than a pinky fingernail.

This method is informed by University of Oregon professor emeritus Alan Shanks, whose research has shown that the number of larval crab caught in these traps could help predict the commercial harvest of adult crab four years later (with about 86% accuracy).

Newly hatched Dungeness crab enter the water column and drift with the currents for about 80 days before moving to nearshore and estuary environments, usually in the spring and summer months.

Near the shore, among oyster beds or rocky habitats covered with macroalgae and eelgrass, larvae find a place to land and grow for about two years before migrating to deeper water.

The baby crab will grow up to the big crab J.J. Wilbur harvested in June in about four years.

Science often moves slowly, but in just six years the crab research group launched these widespread efforts to trap and count the larvae and begin to track their distribution, creating the first standardized dataset on larval Dungeness in the region.

It has begun to uncover a gradient of population density from the crabby San Juan Islands south to the tip of Hood Canal and end of Puget Sound, where the crab almost disappear.

Dungeness crab in the South Sound, which had never supported a big fishery, had declined from a more than 200,000-pound harvest in 2012 to less than 10,000 in 2017.

These southern reaches of Puget Sound and Hood Canal have much smaller crab populations than the northern areas and scientists hypothesize they may not be able to rebound as quickly from harvest because of environmental conditions.

It takes more time for saltwater coming in from the outer coast to exchange in Hood Canal and South Puget Sound, resulting in fewer larval crab flowing into those basins and leaving oxygen-depleted warmer waters that may be less friendly to the growth of the young crab that do land there.

Initial modeling has indicated the currents likely pull to the north all the larvae released in the South Sound, said Margaret Homerding, shellfish program manager with the Nisqually Tribe.

Researchers have also hypothesized that differences in temperature and prey availability across seasons may affect crab development in the more productive regions.

Swinomish biologists found crab larvae collected in the cooler spring months started at a bigger size and grew faster in a lab than larvae collected in July. Diverse growth rates may be driven by differences in temperature or food availability, but more research is needed.

Adult Dungeness have few predators but are known to be eaten by lingcod, cabezon, wolf eels and sea otters.

The threats to Dungeness are more likely to come from marine conditions – hypoxia (low oxygen), ocean warming and acidification, sedimentation from dredging, and disease, pesticides and other pollutants – some the result of climate change.

The research group hopes its research can be a tool for fisheries managers to better predict how climate stressors will influence the crab available to harvest.

Next steps

Jay Dimond, a research assistant professor at Western Washington University, is working with the Jamestown S’Klallam and Swinomish tribes within the crab research group to help understand Dungeness genetics, including correlations between adaptations and environmental conditions.

Researchers want to determine whether the crab represent multiple genetic populations, and how well connected the crab are from one part of the Salish Sea to the other. This could help answer questions about what happened in the South Sound, and how to manage fisheries to prevent it from happening elsewhere. Genetic diversity is a species’ best defense against environmental change.

“Ultimately, the more data you have about a fishery, the better you’ll be poised to respond to issues that may arise,” Dimond said.

Early research has suggested some crab in the Salish Sea may arrive from the outer coast, but it’s not clear how many, how often or how far they travel.

The state began light-trap monitoring in Westport, Grays Harbor County; Tokeland, Pacific County; and Mukilteo in 2023 as a member of the crab research group. The state is exploring using larval abundance estimates to inform management of the fisheries.

In Puget Sound, the state says it is unlikely the larval data will be used to directly influence management or project harvest limits, but it could help better understand the populations and their distribution.

While there is not a comprehensive model that incorporates historical harvests, oceanographic data and biological data, the state is hoping to develop it with the help of the crab research group’s data.

The state this month hired a scientist who will focus on the impacts of climate change on coastal fisheries and help develop this model.

“A lot of our work is how do we bring something back from the brink?” Buckner, of the crab research group, said. “With Dungeness crab, the way I think about it is, why do we have to wait till it’s on the brink? Why can’t we do something right now?”