Thursday, October 26, 2023

Snow crab die-off hard to fathom

I initially misread reports of missing snow crabs in Alaska's waters. I thought it said that 20 million of the crabs had just disappeared between 2018 and 2021, and I thought "Ooh, that's a lot!" On closer inspection, though, it turns out that 10 billion snow crabs have just disappeared.

That's more crabs of a specific species in a specific area than the whole population of humanity across the whole world! Who knew there were so many crabs out there?

It seems that the snow crabs have not just moved somewhere else, due to the changing climate or whatever. They have actually died off, due to that self-same changing climate, the largest mortality collapse known to the species.

This is just another of those unseen, under-reported climate catastrophes. It's getting hard to wrap one's mind around the enormity of what's happening.

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