Michael Litzow, director of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s shellfish assessment program, told me: “If we lose ice, we lose water by 2 degrees. “The water is cold, that’s their niche—they’re an arctic animal.”
Snow crabs can recover after a few years, as long as there aren’t any warm water periods. But if the warming trend continues, as scientists predict, marine heatwaves will return, putting pressure on crab populations once again.
Scattered bones the wild part of the Island of St. Paul as Ezekiel’s Valley in the Old Testament—reindeer ribs, seal teeth, fox femurs, whale vertebrae and light bird skulls lurking in the grass and along the rocks, evidence of the abundance of wildlife and 200 years of killing seals.
When I visited Phil Zavadil, the city manager and husband of Aqualina, in his office, I found several sea lion shoulder bones on the coffee table. Called “yes/no” bones, they have fins along the top and a heavy ball at one end. In St. Paul, they work like a magic number eight ball. If you drop one and it lands with its fins facing to the right, then the answer to your question is yes. If it’s pointing to the left, the answer is no. A large advert read, “The City of St. Paul.” The other is labeled “budget bone”.
Zavadil told me the long-term health of the town wasn’t quite as dire when the crab’s sudden disappearance occurred. It invested in the golden age of crab fishing and with a somewhat reduced budget could be self-sustaining for a decade.
“That is if something drastic doesn’t happen. If we don’t have to make drastic cuts,” he said. “Hopefully the crabs will come back to some extent.”
Zavadil says the easiest economic solution to the collapse of the crab industry is to convert the factory to processing other types of fish. There are some regulatory hurdles, but they are not insurmountable. City leaders are also exploring mariculture—raising seaweed, sea cucumbers, and sea urchins. That requires finding markets and testing aquaculture methods in St. Paul. He said the fastest time for that could be three years. Or they can promote tourism. The island has about 300 tourists every year, most of them avid birdwatchers.
“But you think about doubling that,” he said.
The trick is stabilizing the economy before too many working-age people leave. There were more jobs than people to fill them. Older people have passed away, younger families are moving.
“I had someone come up to me the other day and say, ‘The village is dying,’” he says, but he doesn’t see things that way. Still people working and lots of solutions to try.
“There is cause for alarm if we do nothing,” he said. “We’re trying to work things out and act as best we can.”
Aquilina Lestenkof’s grandson, Aaron Lestenkof, is an island sentinel with the tribal government, a job that entails monitoring wildlife and overseeing the removal of an endless stream of trash washed ashore. He drove me along the bumpy road down to the coast to see the beaches that would soon be noisy and crowded with seals.
