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A comment on Alaska snow crab season canceled after disappearance of an estimated 1B crabs. Parent comment

Re:Alaska snow crab season canceled after disappearance of a... by hedgehog on Friday October 14, 2022 @04:24PM (#33208407)
I don't know much about snow crab but Dungeness and various oysters in the Pacific Northwest US are threatened by rising ocean acidity caused by increased CO2. Warmer water is also allowing green crabs to take hold. Farther south urchins have killed off a lot of kelp forest in a way that seems not to self-correct. Easy to imagine there are similar problems all over the ocean.
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Re:Alaska snow crab season canceled after disappearance of a... by soperj on Friday October 14, 2022 @04:42PM (#33208590)
Sea urchins are a problem everywhere in the pacific, and that's because their main predator (sea otters) were nearly wiped out.
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Re:Alaska snow crab season canceled after disappearance of a... by swhalen on Friday October 14, 2022 @06:26PM (#33209528)
I think it's just the western coast of North America that has this problem, rather than the entire Pacific. For example in New Zealand, which is in the Pacific, there were never any sea otters. Urchins, regarded locally as a delicacy, are not particularly abundant.
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Re:Alaska snow crab season canceled after disappearance of a... by greggsy on Friday October 14, 2022 @06:34PM (#33209600)
Crown-of-thorns starfish, on the other hand, are a very serious problem in Australia
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Re:Alaska snow crab season canceled after disappearance of a... by rileyphone on Friday October 14, 2022 @04:37PM (#33208535)
At least the urchin problem is caused, in part, by the mysterious sea star wasting disease - a disbiosis of their microbial layer that leads to rapid death. Sea stars are the natural predators of the urchins, and with their disappearance, the urchins flourish and take down the kelp.
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Re:Alaska snow crab season canceled after disappearance of a... by steelframe on Friday October 14, 2022 @05:52PM (#33209253)
> Sea stars are the natural predators of the urchins, and with their disappearance, the urchins flourish and take down the kelp.

No problem. We simply unleash wave after wave of Chinese needle snakes. They'll wipe out the the urchins.

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Re:Alaska snow crab season canceled after disappearance of a... by kfrzcode on Friday October 14, 2022 @06:06PM (#33209373)
Things that are easy to imagine aren't always easy to prove
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