Posts Tagged Domoic acid

Aug 5 2016

Agencies Mull Options to Prepare for Future Domoic Acid Events

CDPH Crab Testing 7CDPH staff collects viscera from cooked crabs during domoic acid testing in 2015.   photo courtesy CDPH

 

In 2015/2016, there was an unprecedented bloom of a single-celled plant called Pseudo-nitzschia in ocean waters, which resulted in  elevated levels of domoic acid in Dungeness crab and rock crab. The elevated levels of domoic acid in crab along the West Coast impacted California fisheries from Santa Barbara to the Oregon Border.

The conditions that support the growth of Pseudo-nitzschia are impossible to predict, but tend to be more common in the warmer months of the year. Crustaceans, fish and shellfish are capable of accumulating elevated levels of domoic acid in their viscera and muscle tissue.

Domoic acid was discovered in California in 1991.  Shortly after, in 1993, the California Department of Public Health (CDPH) initiated its marine biotoxin monitoring program and now, through a network of volunteers, routinely collects phytoplankton and bivalve shellfish samples from a number of sampling sites along the coast year-round. As elevated levels of domoic acid are identified in bivalve shellfish in a particular area, additional species (anchovies, sardines, crabs, lobster, etc.) are sampled and analyzed for domoic acid content. CDPH coordinates with the California Department of Fish and Wildlife (CDFW) to collect pre-season Dungeness crab samples each fall from representative locations along the coastline. This pre-season monitoring ensures that Dungeness crab do not contain elevated levels of domoic acid when the fishery opens.

Last year, CDPH found elevated levels of domoic acid in Dungeness and rock crab along a large portion of the California coastline. When CDPH finds that crab contain a level of domoic acid in the viscera that exceeds the federal action level, a health advisory is issued to notify the public of the risk of consumption.  The 2015/16 season was also unique in that it was the first year that CDPH isolated domoic acid from the meat of both Dungeness and rock crab.  Continued harvest of crab with elevated levels of domoic acid from an area under advisory and offering those crab for sale puts the fisherman and subsequent distributors and retailers in violation of the law.

During the 2015/2016 event, the Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment, in consultation with CDPH, determined that the fishery should be closed for both recreational and commercial fishing in order to avoid potentially serious human health impacts. A recommendation to close the fishery was initiated by California state health agencies when Dungeness crab viscera or meat exceeded the action level.

The agencies involved have reviewed the 2015/16 event and evaluated options for handling future events. While an event of this magnitude is unlikely to occur very often, state agencies plan to prepare a response in case another event occurs. The agencies plan to discuss options and hear additional feedback and ideas from the Dungeness crab industry later this month.

Read more about preparations being made for future events in the full version of the multi-agency memorandum Domoic Acid Background and Potential Option for Future Events.  Visit the Ocean Protection Council website for information regarding opportunities to join the discussion.


from Memorandum issued by the California Department of Fish and Wildlife, California Department of Public Health, and California Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment

Aug 1 2016

Consider the Crab

 

Lori French, the daughter-in-law of a crab fisherman, the wife of another, and the mother of a third, placed two large bowls on a table. The one labeled “California” sat empty. The other, reading “Oregon,” was filled to the brim with bright-lavender-and-orange Dungeness crabs. It was early February, the night before the annual hearing of the Joint Committee on Fisheries and Aquaculture at the state capitol, and French, who’s the president of a nonprofit called Central Coast Women for Fisheries, had organized a banquet that was part festive crab feed, part bare-knuckled lobbying effort.

For the benefit of her attendees, who included elected officials, bureaucrats, scientists, and fishermen and their families, she had shipped hundreds of pounds of Dungeness down from Oregon, where, unlike in California, the annual crab season was already under way. She believed that state officials were being too cautious in prohibiting commercial crabbing due to an outbreak of toxic domoic acid, an embargo that had decimated the fortunes of some 1,800 crab-fishing captains and crews in California. Domoic acid, she pointed out, had neither killed nor caused a reported sickening of anyone so far this year. Washington State had let commercial fishermen on the water. Why not reopen the waters in California?

It wouldn’t be that easy. The California Department of Public Health requires scientists to confirm two consecutive clean tests for potentially harmful toxins in locally caught crabs. Since the fall, at least one of every two tests had reported unacceptably high levels of domoic acid, which can poison all kinds of sea life and can sicken and potentially kill humans. By the time I caught up with French again in mid-March, several weeks after the banquet, the state’s crabbers were still out of luck. One recent test had come back clear, French told me over the phone. With one more clean bill of health, her husband and hundreds of other fishermen working the coastline from Santa Barbara up to Crescent City would have been able to drop pots and catch crabs. But when the subsequent test results came back, they weren’t good: A crab had been found with domoic acid levels in its organs at 38 parts per million, 8 above the cutoff level. French was devastated: “Our last bit of hope was just jerked away,” she said.

Through her organization, French knows fishermen and their families across California. The day before our chat, she’d spoken to one fisherman whose house was on the verge of foreclosure. Today she’d talked to another who had found a job in Washington but needed $200 to travel there. Despite fundraising dinners held in port towns along the coast, need outpaced money. French was amassing a long waiting list of fishing families requiring assistance. Pain crept into her voice when she talked about the food banks that had sprung up at the docks: “We’re the people who provide food, and we don’t have any.”

The Frenches are better off than many of the families for whom crab fishing is a way of life. Lori’s father-in-law bought agricultural land on the Central Coast in the ’70s. After he was killed coming back into the Morro Bay harbor in 1987, the farm—on which they grow avocados—passed to her and her husband, Jeff. Jeff has been in the fishing business since he was 16, and the Frenches now own two boats: the Nadine, a 53-footer, and the 42-foot Langosta II. But with the boats both idle, the Frenches had to rely solely on their other sources of income. They sell eggs to pay the grocery bills, and Lori works part-time as an office manager for a construction firm. Now they were considering putting the back bedroom up on Airbnb.

After we talked, French sent me an email. Make sure, she wrote, to emphasize that nobody had gotten sick this year from eating crabs. In fact, the Frenches knew some fishermen who had eaten Dungeness just the other day and had no problems. They would never want to sell something unsafe, she said, and she was sure that the crabs along California’s coast were harmless. “We’re not Chipotle,” she said.

It’s hard to imagine any Northern California food industry more local and sustainable—call it ocean-to-table—than crab fishing. A crew of guys (they’re almost always guys) on a boat drop big metal pots rigged with bait—squid, mackerel, maybe clams—into the water directly off our coast. Then, a day later, they come back and lug the pots up, loaded with crawling, snapping Metacarcinus magister, bound for markets and restaurants mere hours (or minutes) away from the point of capture.

But crab fishing is sustainable only if the ocean waters that the crabs swim in aren’t poisonous—and for five months of the 2015–16 crabbing season, they were. A vast toxic algae bloom, one of the largest ever recorded, produced enough domoic acid to effectively kill most of the season, and although the crab fishery finally did open, an ominous shadow had fallen over the entire coast. And not just for people who rely on crabbing for their livelihood: The great crab shutdown of 2016 was one of those events that inspire ominous thoughts in many coastal dwellers about the fragility of our food supply and the vulnerability of our producers. We’ve gone in just a few short years from theorizing about what might happen someday in a changing climate to grappling with the harsh realities of the Anthropocene—the geological epoch in which human impacts on the environment can no longer be ignored. This is a story about the instability of the seafood we eat and the degenerative health of the water it comes from. But mostly it’s a story about people who fish for crab and what happened the year they couldn’t.

In the same way that Hemingway described going bankrupt, the 2015–16 Dungeness crab season fell apart gradually, then suddenly. In the winter of 2012–13, an area of high atmospheric pressure parked in the northeastern Pacific Ocean. Dubbed the Ridiculously Resilient Ridge by a graduate student at Stanford, it deflected westerly winds away from the state. Normally, those winds churn the oceans, helping cooler water at lower depths well up toward the surface. With lower rates of upwelling, the water off the Pacific coast reached warmer temperatures than ever before recorded. At their peaks in 2014 and 2015, water temperatures were recorded at more than five degrees Celsius above normal, according to Clarissa Anderson, a biological oceanographer at UC Santa Cruz.

Nicholas Bond, the state of Washington’s climatologist, nicknamed the patch of warm water, which at times reached all the way from Alaska to Mexico, the Blob, and like its B-movie namesake, it wreaked havoc. The atypically warm water likely played a role in nourishing a vast algae bloom stretching from Santa Barbara to Alaska, 40 miles wide and 650 feet deep, whose poisonous by-products included domoic acid and paralytic shellfish toxins. Charismatic megafauna like sea lions washed up on beaches, apparently starving. You probably saw stories on Facebook about an inordinate number of sick seal pups being taken to the Marine Mammal Center in Marin to be rehabilitated—it was all connected. Although this year’s El Niño caused the algae bloom to more or less dissipate, the closure of the crab season had been set in motion.

In May 2015 at the docks of the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute, scientists launched person-size robotic submersibles packed with sensors and instruments. By the end of the month, these “biochemistry labs in a can” had returned with the news: Domoic acid, a naturally occurring organic molecule that usually dissipates harmlessly, was gathering at alarming rates. During a normal year, concentrations of 1,000 nanograms of the acid per liter of seawater would count as high. Last spring, Monterey Bay reached 10 to 30 times that level. By June, dead anchovies were washing ashore at Moss Landing, between Santa Cruz and Monterey, showing high levels of domoic acid in their bodies.

Biologists and public health officials were understandably alarmed by the findings. After the continent’s first recorded outbreak of domoic acid poisoning, which sickened at least 107 people and killed 3 in Canada’s Prince Edward Island in 1987, scientists began to study it in earnest. The U.S. National Library of Medicine’s Toxicology Data Network keeps a dossier online: In 1991, domoic acid was discovered in the bodies of dead pelicans and cormorants in Monterey Bay—and soon after in the bodies of razor clams and Dungeness crabs in Oregon and Washington. Over five days in January 1996, 150 brown pelicans died at the tip of Baja California, likely after they’d eaten contaminated mackerel. Researchers have tied a series of sea lion miscarriages and pup deaths in the Channel Islands to domoic acid poisoning in the brains and bodies of the fetuses and newborns. In February of this year, Frances Gulland, a scientist who works at the Marine Mammal Center, published a paper reporting domoic acid poisoning in marine mammals off the Alaskan coast—the farthest north ever detected. Thirty large whales died in the Gulf of Alaska last summer, with domoic acid as a prime suspect. Domoic-acid-producing toxic algae blooms (the algae’s scientific name is Pseudo-nitzschia) have been found around the world, including off the coasts of Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Texas, the Netherlands, Japan, Korea, Spain, and New Zealand and, closest to home, in Monterey Bay last May.

The question everyone wants the answer to, of course, is whether the extraordinarily large algae bloom that led to this year’s domoic acid outbreak was caused by global warming. Scientists are hesitant to assign a single cause to such phenomena, but they are fairly uniform in their conclusion that catastrophic natural events like the drought-worsening Ridiculously Resilient Ridge and the Pseudo-nitzschia-spawning warm-water Blob are a preview of worse times to come. Writing in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, a team of Stanford scientists said that events like the Ridiculously Resilient Ridge “occur much more frequently in the present climate than in the absence of human emissions.” (A follow-up paper this year by the same team buttressed that conclusion.)

Though they are reticent about dealing a final verdict, scientists are increasingly worried that the anomalous could become the norm—that algae blooms and toxin outbreaks may well happen again, and with increased frequency and potentially worse consequences, as the climate changes.

Bodega Bay is “about an hour and a half on the freeway. Or two if you take the coast highway.” So says a character to Tippi Hedren in Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds, which, coincidentally, was partially inspired by a mass die-off of seabirds in 1961 that scientists now link to a domoic acid outbreak. I drove up on the freeway, but it took me over two hours to putter from my apartment in Oakland to the Fishetarian restaurant in Bodega Bay. There, on a weekday morning in March, I met Shane Lucas, who paused from slinging fried cod sandwiches (mayonnaise, hot sauce, delicious) to talk about the season. After watching the wholesaler on the dock next to his sell Dungeness for years, he finally leased a boat with a permit and bought $50,000 worth of crab pots. “I thought I could make it back in two weeks,” he said. Now the pots were in dry dock under a nearby tree. “At least they look pretty, and they’ll keep until next year.”

Once you notice the pots, round metal wire traps about 18 inches high and a yard across, you see them everywhere, piled in backyards and lining the roads, standing at attention like an army that hasn’t left the barracks. There must have been dozens at the Tides, the town’s main wholesaler. Inside, a sign on a bulletin board had a forlorn message: “Help Our Fishermen. Bring food donations to the Spud Point Marina Office. Monday to Friday, 9 am to 5 pm.”

At the entrance to the Spud Point Marina, hundreds of crab pots dried in the sun. Across the street, the Spud Point Crab Co., a restaurant housed in a small shack, looked deserted. I was there to meet Dick Ogg, the captain of the fishing boat Karen Jeanne. He rested his weathered hands and chipped fingernails on a table inside the boat’s cabin as his two dogs, Buster and Nessie, ran around. Had this been a rough season for him? I asked, a little weakly. “Rough?” he chuckled. “That’s kind of an understatement.”

Ogg, 63, has fished recreationally his whole life—he still free-dives for abalone. Around 2000, he began to transition away from his job as an electrician and move into commercial fishing; now he and his crew fish for Dungeness, salmon, and black cod. He proudly showed me pictures of cod he’s caught, beaming like they were his grandchildren. The captains and deckhands in Bodega Bay rely on salmon in the summer and Dungeness in the winter. Last year’s salmon season was a disaster, but at least it opened. Ogg had hoped a strong crab season would pick up the slack. This, too, would be a disappointment.

In a typical year, it would have gone like this: About 60 days before the start of the season, Ogg and his two deckhands would have begun to prep the Karen Jeanne. Then they’d have waited for the all clear from the state, which usually happens in November. As a group, the fishermen would have negotiated a price for their catch with wholesalers before heading out. “If the weather allows, we’ll fish every single day” from around Thanksgiving time through Chinese New Year in February. Crabs depending, they’ll sometimes even fish into April, Ogg said.

The job is exhausting, but it pays. The first time that Ogg worked with his current crew, a few years ago, they pulled 70 pots loaded with Dungeness out of the water—over 7,000 pounds’ worth—in a single run. After they off-loaded, the crew wanted to call it a day. Ogg wanted to head out again. “They said they were tired. I said, ‘OK, but you realize that run was roughly $18,000. You want to give up another $18,000 tonight?’” (Ogg rules with a light hand—the crew won a rest.) Generally, deckhands receive between 10 and 15 percent of the proceeds from the catch, although some captains deduct costs before splitting the money. (Ogg doesn’t.) The most profitable part of the season is around the holidays. Between Thanksgiving and New Year’s, a crew member can make $30,000, amounting to 80 percent of the year’s income.

The hopes for a year like that were dashed early on, when the state closed the commercial crab fishery on November 6 of last year. The Department of Fish and Wildlife tapped Ogg as one of its unpaid volunteers to collect crab samples, which were then delivered to a lab in Richmond to be tested for domoic acid levels. So instead of hauling hundreds of crabs, the Karen Jeanne spent the winter catching six at a time—no more, no less—from three different depths at predesignated locations. Up and down the state, nervous fishermen reloaded Fish and Wildlife’s website every morning to see whether the little red dot next to “Dungeness crab” had turned green, indicating that the season was open. “When I started realizing this wasn’t going to happen,” said Ogg, “my objective was to find income for the deckhands. Most of the captains can tough it out, but the crews don’t have anything. They are young families, young guys, just hoping and waiting that everything will work out.”

The Spud Point Marina Advisory Board collected donations and passed out $100 Safeway gift cards to the crew members every month. Community members started a food bank in the harbor office. Some guys moved to live on the boats. Nobody wanted to say it, but drinking, always a problem among fishermen, became a bigger one. Although it was possible to find jobs on land, it was difficult, because the crabbers needed to be ready to fish at short notice. Ogg helped arrange day jobs for his crew doing electrical work. Others worked as substitute teachers, day laborers, or Christmas tree sellers.

Over a life on the water, Ogg has watched the changes roll by like waves. Forty years ago, he could find salmon in Bodega Bay. Not anymore. Albacore and rockfish would congregate in the Cordell Banks to the south, but it became a marine sanctuary in the ’80s, so he can no longer fish there. Last year, the salmon, starving, possibly because of low supplies of krill, turned to eating hard bait like anchovy and sardines. Usually the salmon’s flesh is red, like the licorice rope that the crew keeps on the boat, but last year it turned dry and tasteless and an unhealthy-seeming pink. During this last year, Ogg witnessed the most significant changes in the ocean that he’d ever seen: “It went from a cooler, krill-laden ocean to basically sterile up and down the coastline.” The domoic acid, he thinks, may have even affected whales. “They came right under the boat—that’s the first time that’s happened,” he said. “When we’re pulling, the whales will come up to sit and watch. They never used to do that. I keep thinking they are eating [domoic acid] and getting drunk.”

I mentioned that domoic acid causes amnesia and disorientation, and that the whales may indeed have been poisoned. He nodded sadly. I changed the subject and asked how he likes to eat crab. Cioppino or cracked? He lightened. “I’ll eat crab occasionally, but after you’ve seen hundreds of thousands of them, you don’t want to see it anymore. The boys”—that’s what he calls his crew—“eat it, though. It’s good for them.”

I asked him whether he thought that this year was an anomaly or part of a longer trend. The mood darkened again. Although he thought that much of what happened this year was cyclical, he was worried about the long term. “There’s a lot of young people in this business,” he said. “We have to do something to promote them. Otherwise, the industry is going to pass away.”

Although wounded, the state’s fishermen pulled through. The end of the closure came as a shock, a welcome surprise. On March 26, a few weeks after I’d chatted with Lori French and visited Dick Ogg, the little dot next to “Dungeness crab”on the Fish and Wildlife website turned from red to green. Crab season was back on, albeit five months later than normal. On Twitter, food writer John Birdsall called it “basically San Francisco Christmas.”

The next day, I paid a visit to the docks near Pier 45 in San Francisco. Despite the Alcatraz Psych Ward sweatshirts and In-N-Out Burger, Fisherman’s Wharf still operates as an actual wharf for actual fishermen. You can find them, too, if you sneak out back, past the tiny wooden Catholic chapel that still holds a Latin Mass on Sundays, to the long pier that points toward the Golden Gate Bridge. Inside a prep room behind Scoma’s restaurant, a crew of white-clad cleaners sprayed down the rubber mats on the floors with big hoses. Across the water, a forklift moved stacks of crab pots a half dozen at a time to cranes attached to the dock, where they would be loaded onto waiting boats. Lines were untied. Equipment was loaded and unloaded. Decks were swabbed. Cigarettes extinguished. Nods were exchanged and final conversations in English, Spanish, and Vietnamese were held. By the time the city’s office workers had staggered to their desks, the boats were long gone.

The following morning, as the first loads of crab returned, I wandered inside the warehouse at Alber Seafoods, where workers were packaging the harvest and moving it onto waiting trucks. Two men unloaded live crabs into plastic bins filled with water. Last year, on the first day of the season, workers say they’d cleared an estimated 14,000 pounds. Today they’d pulled in 5,800. I asked one of the workers how the crabs looked: “Nice and full,” he said, but there just weren’t enough of them. “We missed it all.” At least, I suggested, there was pent-up demand. People must be dying to eat crabs, yeah? Maybe not. “Like I tell my wife, it’s like sex,” he said. “After a while, you’re just out of the mood.”

To test this thesis, I headed over to Nob Hill, where by 11:30 there was a line out the door of Swan Oyster Depot on Polk Street. In the window, fresh crabs sat on a bed of ice, their carapaces gleaming like gemstones in the sunlight. Waiting to get inside were representatives from every one of San Francisco’s jockeying demographics: a tourist; a college kid in a Cal football jersey; a pair of working-class dudes drinking beer from plastic cups; a couple of women wearing black leggings and sipping from water bottles, fresh from exercise class; a lady with dyed green hair wearing a “Humans for Bernie” T-shirt. Time for us to eat some Dungeness crab.

I paid $24 in cash for a half-cracked crab and an Anchor Steam. (The yellow viscera known as crab butter is safe to eat, too, but since domoic acid collects at higher concentrations there than in the meat, I avoided it. Also, I don’t really like it.) I piled the meat from a leg onto a thick slice of sourdough and splashed it with a goopy dollop of red cocktail sauce. So sweet, so cold, so delicious. The fisherman was obviously wrong. How could anyone not be in the mood for this?

In the dark before dawn on May 3, a little over a month into the abbreviated crab season, Dick Ogg guided the Karen Jeanne out of the Spud Point Marina. It was just after 5 a.m. on what would be their second-to-last crab run of the season, and ahead shone the lights of fishing boats that had left ahead of us. Onboard were Dick, the dogs, and his two deckhands. Hal, who works as a firefighter in San Jose, pulled his hoodie snugly against himself and napped inside the cabin. Joe, who works construction on the side, talked in nervous bursts of energy. As the sky began to lighten, Dick explained the day’s plan. They’d fish in the relatively shallow coastal waters of Bodega Bay, between their berth at the north end and Tomales Bay State Park to the south, where the federal government had recently forced the closure of the Drakes Bay Oyster Company farm. Filled with bait, their crab pots lay in rows by the dozen at the bottom of the water. When the boat passed by, Hal and Joe would raise them to the surface, hoping to find them filled with crabs. Normally, they would then add new bait and return the pots to the water, but today they’d stack the pots on deck to haul back with them.

It was a 15-mile run southeast to the first group of pots, the exact location of which I am bound not to reveal. The water was clear and calm. By 6:55, the sun had risen behind low clouds and we’d arrived. Joe elbowed Hal awake, and the two men put on rubber work clothes. “These days,” said Joe, “I run on 5-Hour Energy and attitude.” Dick climbed up to the top of the cabin, where another steering wheel allowed him to control the boat while keeping an eye on the buoys that marked where the pots sat in the water. I clambered up behind him.

The boat, rocking gently but persistently, pulled alongside a buoy that marked a pot’s location. “Coming up, coming up, coming up!” the crewmen called excitedly. Dick angled the approach so that the pot was close to starboard, where Hal waited with a hook affixed to a long pole. He attached a rope to an electric winch that pulled the pot up. Hal coiled the loose rope into an empty trash can, and Joe unclipped the buoy and cleaned it in a bucket full of bleach and water. When the trap emerged into the air, Joe and Hal took hold of it on either side and poured more than a dozen, maybe 20, crabs into a small holding tank. Joe hugged his arms around the sides of the pot and walked to the back of the deck, where he dropped it. They threw the leftover bait back into the water, which soon roiled with seagulls. When they had a moment, they used a metal tool to measure the length of each crab—61/4 inches was the magic number; any males smaller than that got thrown back, along with all the females. Joe and Hal tossed the keepers into a massive tank installed in the hull. The crabs’ claws twitched open and closed as they spun like Frisbees into the water.

The deckhands had about a minute before the boat, which never stopped moving forward, arrived at the next buoy, marking another pot. The day before, they’d pulled 160 80-pound pots out of the water, after which Hal had stacked them at Dick’s house past dark. The next day they would do it again, for the final time this season. Relatively speaking, these were slow, easy days.

By midafternoon, the crew had piled the back of the boat high with empty pots, and hundreds of crabs wriggled in the hold. The boat tipped noticeably toward its stern. Dick and the crew debated going after one more string of pots before heading home. They could do it either today or tomorrow, and as the boys began to call out, “One more! One more! One more!” Dick laid in the course.

They loaded until they had no more room, and then it was time to head home. At the Tides, they tied the boat up alongside a small crane, with which a worker pulled up the empty pots three at a time; another drove them away with a forklift. Once they had unloaded the pots, they pumped the water out of the hold and loaded crab after crab into crates. Beady eyes blinked and mouths gaped open and closed silently as the men grabbed them at the base of the back legs. Joe tried to convince the guys to buy his rare albino crab, which was actually an ordinary crab that he’d accidentally dropped into some bleach. No takers. He tossed it overboard.

The men had harvested just over 1,000 pounds. Two of the gorgeous little suckers came home with me in a box on the backseat of my Civic. For the 12-plus hours of work, Dick made a little more than $3,200. Joe and Hal each went home with $480. Not life-changing money, but a respectable haul—so much so that I asked Dick why they’d decided to call it a season. “It’s always good to stop,” he reasoned. “Nature’s telling me it’s time to move on.”

As summer began, life continued along the coast. Ogg motored the Karen Jeanne up to Washington, where he hoped the ship’s engine would be rebuilt in time for the late-summer salmon run. At the Marine Mammal Center, Frances Gulland braced for another year’s worth of dying sea lion pups. In the waters off Washington, scientists launched their own robotic “laboratory in a can,” similar to the one used in Monterey.

According to the preliminary figures from the California Department of Fish and Wildlife, in March, April, and May, fishermen had caught 5.7 million pounds of Dungeness crab, almost all of that total in April. That was less than a third of the yearly average over the last decade. In Monterey Bay, scientists kept a wary eye on domoic acid levels as the annual algae bloom returned. Around summer solstice, the answer began to emerge: It was good news. Tests indicated that levels had crept up to only three parts per million in mussels—far below the level of concern. Although a larger bloom could still occur, the likelihood increased that the state’s crab fishermen would catch a break this November.

That victory, however, may not last. This year was a scary wakeup call for the crab fishers, and the scariest thing was that there was nothing they could do, save for changing professions, to mitigate the next disaster. Another strong algae bloom, the crabbers fear, could bring the industry to its knees. Two lost seasons in a row could all but destroy it.

Could the Dungeness crab fishery disappear entirely? Probably not. But then again, who really knows? These are dark and uncertain times. Someday, not so long from now, you might miss eating Dungeness crab. You’ll miss sitting around the kitchen table with your family, crabs splayed out on white butcher paper, everybody splitting legs open with a nutcracker. You’ll miss the ritual, how it made you feel connected to the place where you live and to the people who hauled your feast up from the seafloor. Maybe you’ll bore the grandkids one day, years from now, with stories about how you used to pile the empty shells in bowls until the bowls tipped over.


Originally published: http://modernluxury.com/san-francisco/story/consider-the-crab

May 3 2016

One North Coast “Hot Crab” Pushes California’s Fishery Officials to Reconsider Opening Protocols

— Posted with permission of SEAFOODNEWS.COM. Please do not republish without their permission. —

Copyright © 2016 Seafoodnews.com

Seafood News


SEAFOODNEWS.COM by Susan Chambers – April 29, 2016

If anyone has a right to be crabby about the Dungeness crab season in California, it’s the fishermen and processors in Northern California.

Persistent levels of domoic acid in the crab in California delayed the Dungeness and rock crab along the whole coast and have allowed limited, incremental openings of sport and commercial fisheries in certain areas. The industry anxiously awaited word on the last hold-out area, at Trinidad, in Humboldt County, Thursday, but the April 28 test returned one “hot” crab that had levels exceeding 30 ppm.

California Department of Fish and Wildlife’s Pete Kalvass said Thursday the department was going to have internal discussions and solicit feedback from the industry about what, if anything, could be done to open the fishery on the North Coast.

Recreational fisheries are open from Humboldt Bay entrance to the California/Mexico border. Commercial Dungeness fisheries are open from the Mendocino/Sonoma county line south. That leaves three counties, Mendocino, Humboldt and Del Norte, that remain closed to commercial crabbing.

Coincidentally, Sen. Mike McGuire, D-North Coast and chairman of the Joint Committee on Fisheries and Aquaculture, held a hearing the same day to get an update on the crab disaster declaration and domic acid ocean conditions.

Mike Lucas, president of North Coast Fishers Inc., was one of the panelists.

“We saw markets disappear,” he said, noting that more localized issues, like crab feeds, also disappeared or were reduced. These are the biggest fundraisers of the year for some organizations, he said. “There have been boats lost, families split, homes lost and communities have suffered,” he said in his written comments.

Pacific Coast Federation of Fishermen’s Associations Executive Director Tim Sloane mentioned similar circumstances.

“Two board members tell me they’re getting out of fishing as a direct result of this closure,” he said.

McGuire had proposed forming a shellfish council — similar to the Oregon Dungeness Crab Commission — to take on some of the marketing and public relations issues that overwhelmed the industry and agencies this year. Panelists generally supported the idea, especially since changing ocean conditions may mean similar upheavals in the progression of the crab season in the future.

“Things are really changing for us,” Sloane said.

And while getting disaster aid and forming a marketing council are good ideas, clear protocols for testing is most important, some of the panelists said. Sloane said written and enforceable protocols for domoic acid testing and management, which include timing, notification procedures and opening protocols, are necessary. Lucas also mentioned the potential for crab quality testing after the Jan. 15 cutoff date should be part of the testing plan. This would ensure the public gets quality crab and the resource isn’t damaged by fishing on crab in softshell conditions, he said.

Some of the other suggestions included:

– Coordinating a media message and engaging all of the state departments and industry in the message to assure the public that crab testing is being done and, once the crab are clear, consumers should have no fear in buying and eating crab;
– Research into whether the 30 ppm threshold is accurate;
– Looking more closely at the 30-day fair start provisions;
– Consider a November-April season, so fishing on softshell crab is avoided.

McGuire said he’d continue to work with state agencies on protocols and would like to get the shellfish council up and running before 2017. In addition, McGuire plans to hold another, shorter hearing in July or August to hear about ocean and industry updates over the summer and a fifth hearing after the season opening in the fall.


Subscribe to SEAFOODNEWS.COM

Dec 21 2015

No Christmas crabs for Californians this year

The savory-sweet meat of Dungeness crab isn’t going to make coastal Californians’ Christmas spreads this year.

Though the neurotoxin responsible for delaying crab season — the algae-produced domoic acid — has slowly begun to wane in the tissues and organs of West Coast Dungeness, the last round of tests in California, taken off more than a dozen ports in late November and early December, showed many samples still solidly above the limit of 30 parts per million. 

Two clean tests, a week a part, will be necessary before crabbers are able to ply the seas again, according to the California Department of Fish and Wildlife. 

Forty-percent of the Dec. 1 Crescent City samples exceeded levels deemed safe, at a total average of 34 parts per million, down from 44 percent and 40 ppm Nov. 18, 

Rough waters have delayed sampling for much of this month, said Senior Environmental Scientist Pete Kalvass, however, he anticipated a boat would be able to get out of Crescent City this week between storms. 

“Hopefully we’ll get the season started after the holidays, but I want to make sure everything is safe for the public,” said Tim Potter, owner of the F/V Pacific Pride, who had been responsible for fishing out the November samples. 

Potter had just returned Tuesday from the A Dock at the Crescent City Harbor, where he’d been hanging Christmas lights on his boat with his wife. Over the phone, he said he wasn’t “chomping at the bit to get on the water.” 

“I don’t get to relax and do a lot of calm stuff. I’m just enjoying time with my family while I have it,” he said. 

Potter’s boat was one of a handful of volunteers to leave pots to collect 12 crabs at graduated depths —15, 25 and 35 fathoms — off both St. George’s Reef and the mouth of the Klamath River. 

Following protocol habitually taken during the pre-season to test for quality and size as well as domoic acid, the crabs are then frozen and shipped overnight to the California Department of Public Health labs in Richmond, to be tested for solely for domoic acid. 

The volunteers pay for the fuel, and the Del Norte Fisherman’s Marketing Association picks up the tab for shipping costs.

Most of the higher domoic acid levels detected have been in Dungeness collected off the North Coast, or in rock crab found in waters surrounding the Channel Islands.

Meanwhile, Humboldt and Del Norte county razor clams are the only bivalve still deemed unsafe for consumption, since CDPH lifted all other health advisories on recreational clams and mollusks Dec. 9. 

Shellfish south of Bodega Bay, and in Oregon, have seemingly dropped off their domoic acid a little more quickly, according to CDPH figures. 

“It’s kind of counterintuitive,” said Kalvass, noting that algae production is generally associated with higher water temperatures. 

Asked why this might be, University of California – Santa Cruz researcher Clarissa Anderson wrote in an email: “Our spotty pier-based monitoring is not extensive enough to really answer this question.”

She had a few guesses, however. Small resurgences of Pseudo-nitzschia, the single-celled chain-forming algae that produces domoic acid, have been seen since the large algae bloom that caused alarm this summer had dissipated some. This could account for how crabs may continue to ingest domoic acid, she said. 

“Crabs are acquiring DA (domoic acid) in the sediments where there is a lot of DA from the massive bloom. It could be that we just had great DA production in CA hotspots over the summer/early fall, thereby creating a larger pool of DA in the sediments (for) Dungeness to acquire,” said Anderson. 

The North Coast and areas in San Diego are still projected to be hot spots, though this has not been substantiated, she wrote. 

CDFW Director Charlton Bonham has said once the season opens again, there will be a lot of such questions that will need to be vigorously researched.

In the meantime, crabbers will continue to scrape by and volunteer their time and fuel to collect samples, hoping that when the season does open, all the publicity about domoic acid won’t scare customers away, said Capt. Randy Smith of the F/V Mistasea. 

“It’s really hard. Your bills keep going and we’re just sitting here. And with Christmas coming that’s really hard on the crews. That part’s the shame, but we’ve sat for months and months in the past,” he said, conjuring up past seasons stalled by crab that was too small or too poor in quality.

 “There’s no history or data available with domoic acid. It’s just a guess,” Smith said. “You can guess all day long if you want. With soft shell we know what we’re doing in numbers, but with this we don’t have any idea when we’re going to get out there. We’ve all been ready for a couple of months.”

christmasboatsTim Potter and his wife decorated the Pacific Pride with Christmas lights this week, relishing the free time while waiting for crab season to open. Del Norte Triplicate / Bryant Anderson


Read the original post: http://www.triplicate.com/

Dec 18 2015

Changing Tides

news2-magnum.jpg
Photo: HEIDI WALTERS. – The catch that may not come.

“This was a weird year for the ocean,” says Dave Bitts. The 40-year veteran of the local fishing industry and president of the Pacific Coast Federation of Fishermen’s Associations is docked at Woodley Island. He sits at the Marina Café nursing a cup of coffee and talking with some other fish folk about the weather. Normally, the captains wouldn’t be found on dry land any morning past the first of December, the traditional opening date for crab season on the North Coast, but a public health threat has grounded the fleet, spelling possible disaster for thousands of small businesses and families. As Bitts said, it’s no ordinary year.

First, it was the salmon, or the lack thereof. Many small operators fish for salmon in the summer and crab in the winter to make ends meet. This year, however, the runs were thin. Bitts says he grossed about half of his usual haul. He caught a total of six fish after July 8.

“The fish were eating stuff I’m not used to seeing them eat,” he says. “Salmon are wonderful creatures. They can survive off almost anything. This year, though, I cut them open and saw a lot of small octopuses in the fish. I caught fish that were plugged with them. I’ve never seen that before.”

Wade Sinnen, senior environmental scientist with the California Department of Fish and Wildlife, says that although salmon numbers have not been finalized, experts think they will “not meet pre-season expectation.”

“We had that warm water sitting off the coast, it definitely affected the distribution, if not the numbers,” he says, adding that scientists have also noticed the salmon eating strange things, indicating that their normal diet may have been disrupted.

Biologists also blame warmer ocean water for a large algal bloom stretching from the central California Coast up to Washington. The biggest bloom in over a decade, it’s producing unprecedented levels of domoic acid, a powerful neurotoxin that has rendered large quantities of shellfish harmful to human health and forced public officials to stall the opening of the crab fishing season.

“I’m upset, I’m not happy,” said Charlton Bonham, director of the California Department of Fish and Wildlife, at a recent hearing on the delay of the season. “This is a situation that’s causing real harm to many people.”

At the hearing, which was hosted by State Sen. Mike McGuire and Assemblyman Jim Wood on Dec. 3, Bonham reviewed the options in front of officials.

“I don’t know when we will open. You deserve honesty,” he said. “Should we hold and open statewide? Should we open on a regional basis, taking into consideration that a crab may not respect a regional boundary?”

The CDFW has set up a hotline and a webpage for crabbers to call for updates. It will take two consecutive weeks of clean tests before the agency considers opening the season.

“The reports are inconsistent,” McGuire says in a phone interview. “One week we’ll have crab with low levels of domoic acid, another week high levels. We are very much starting to plan for the worst.”

The worst, many agree, would be no crab at all. It already seems likely that the season may open after Christmas, traditionally the height of consumer demand for the Dungeness.

“In particular for Del Norte and Humboldt counties, we are dependent on crab industry for a healthy economy,” McGuire says. “There was a $95-million crab harvest last year; the average is $60 million. There are very few industries that put people before profit, and this is what the Dungeness crab industry has done this year.”

McGuire refers to the publicly stated desire of many crabbers to ensure safe conditions before hoisting anchor.

“We don’t go until we can prove that the crabs are clean,” Bitts says. “Our chances of putting a bad crab on the market are vanishingly small. We want the chances to be as small as they can be. We’re kind of proud of ourselves for being proactive. We’re not recalling anything like the beef or the peanut butter people.”

McGuire, too, praises the high standards of Bitts and his ilk.

“It is the first time you’ve had such significant coordination between crabbers, processors, state and federal government,” McGuire says. “But we’re also in unprecedented times.”

At the Dec. 3 hearing, which brought together scientists, politicians and state officials, there was near-unanimous agreement that climate change is responsible for the changing ocean. Cat Kuhlman, deputy secretary for Oceans and Coastal Policy at the California Natural Resources Agency, warned that these conditions “are the new normal.” Many who work the seas agree.

“It’s impossible to say climate change is not involved,” Bitts says. “With ocean acidification … we’re not looking at a smooth and linear change.”

McGuire has put out the call to those in the industry to begin tallying this season’s costs so far for possible reimbursement, should a state of emergency be declared. On Nov. 24, congressional representatives sent a letter to Gov. Jerry Brown requesting the state consider compensation if the season is canceled.

Bitts says some relief money would be welcome, especially to pay seasonal workers who have been standing by, waiting for their chance to pull out of port. Many captains have lost their crews already. Still others have sunk their savings into gear and getting their crafts ship-shape, leaving little left over for buying Christmas presents. But Bitts says he would rather have the season open late than not at all, adding that the most profitable season he ever had began in January. A start as late as March or April, though? That would be hard, he says.

Businesses and industries tangential to crabbing are also feeling the squeeze. Processing plants, which normally run all hours at full tilt during the season, have stopped hiring. On the other side of the bay, Seth Griggs, third generation owner of Custom Crab Pots, says that a busy November has tapered off into silence.

“This is the first time we’ve ever laid off guys before Thanksgiving,” he says. “I hear of guys moving out of the state, some of them just trying to get work wherever they can.”

But, he adds, crabbers are used to an occasional “bump in the road.”

It was a similar bump that knocked Tim Harkins, formerly a Trinidad crab fisherman, out of the industry in 1992. The season was delayed by many rounds of price negotiation and the subsequent strike of crabbers up and down the coast as they waited for buyers to set a better price per pound.

“It was unusual because people got together,” Harkins says. “There was solidarity up and down the coast.”

Strikes, delays due to underweight crabs, and the vagaries of the weather are common in the industry.

“I would never have much of a margin,” he says. It was, and is, a gamble. Bigger operations might make a year’s salary in two months. Harkins fished year round. With two kids at home, he was barely making it.

The strike broke when some boats in Newport decided to leave harbor. Everyone else followed suit, “stumbling out of the gate.” Then, a few weeks into the season, the news came down. Domoic acid had been found in shellfish off the Washington Coast, the first such discovery. Fishing stopped for the season, and Harkins decided to get out for good. He went on to become a school bus driver, a job with its own set of challenges but a great deal more stability.

“When you fish, there are so many things you have no control over, and one or two more make it the tipping point,” he says.

 

Crab Fisherman’s Lament 1991-92

‘Twas the night before Christmas, and all through the hall,
all the fisherman sat at the conference call.
The boats, they were nestled all snug in the bay,
in hopes that tomorrow would be opening day.
And Bud with his checkbook, and Vince with his pen,
were just sitting down, they had done it again.
They had to come up with some new kind of story,
“Well you know guys we’ve got way too much inventory.
The most we could possibly pay you’s a buck,
if you want more than that, well you’re shit out of luck.”
In all of the ports there arose such a clatter,
people jumped out of bed to see what was the matter.
“All right guys, calm down now, you’ve vented your spleen,
perhaps we could give you a dollar fifteen.”
“Enough of this bullshit, we’ve had it to here,
we’re not goin’ fishing, we’re not setting the gear.”
So we tied up the boats, put away all the bait,
and we all settled down for a long winter’s wait.
In Fort Bragg and Eureka, “Come hell or bad weather”
Crescent City and Brookings “We’re sticking together!”
And even in Trinidad, Port Orford too,
but we just didn’t count on that bad Newport crew.
“We’re not sitting around, nah, we’re setting the gear
the rest of you go stick a squid in your ear!”
Well the wind it was calm, and the ocean was placid,
then came unfamiliar words, DOMOIC ACID.
“For some weird sort of chemical found in the guts
they’re closing the season, those guys must be nuts!”
We ranted and raved, but ’twas to no avail
’cause the Feds and the bureaucrats always prevail
After twenty-some odd days, we finally did go,
and over both shoulders some crabs we did throw.
But there weren’t too many, and a pretty poor price,
For a lot of us Christmas really wasn’t that nice.
Well you knew things got screwed up, now you know the reason.
Happy New Year to all, and, well, maybe next season.

— Tim Harkins F/V Maria Concetta, Trinidad


Read the original post: http://www.northcoastjournal.com/

Nov 4 2015

Emergency Crab Closure Recommended

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE – November 4, 2015

Emergency Crab Closure Recommended
Commission to Meet Thursday

The California Department of Public Health (CDPH) issued a health advisory warning individuals to avoid eating rock and Dungeness crab due to the detection of high levels of domoic acid. The advisory was followed by a recommendation from the Office of Health Hazard Assessment (OEHHA) to the California Fish and Game Commission and the California Department of Fish and Wildlife (CDFW) to delay the start of the Dungeness crab season and close the rock crab fishery. These actions would apply to each fishery from the Oregon border to the southern Santa Barbara County line.

The OEHHA recommendation has prompted an emergency meeting of the Commission, which will take place at 8 a.m. on Thursday, Nov. 5 (agenda and meeting information). At that time, the Commission will consider voting to delay the opening of the recreational Dungeness crab fishery. The recreational Dungeness crab season is currently scheduled to start Saturday, Nov. 7.

Also based on the recommendation from OEHHA, CDFW will act on its authority to delay the start of the commercial Dungeness crab season. The commercial Dungeness crab season is currently scheduled to start Sunday, Nov. 15 in most of the state.

Similar action will be considered by the Commission and CDFW to close the recreational and commercial rock crab fisheries in the affected area. Both recreational and commercial rock crab seasons are open all year.

“These are incredibly important fisheries to our coastal economies and fresh crab is highly anticipated and widely enjoyed this time of year. Of course, delaying or closing the season is disappointing,” said CDFW Marine Regional Manager Craig Shuman. “But public health and safety is our top priority.”

CDFW, along with the OEHHA and CDPH, has been actively testing crabs since early September. OEHHA announced today that consumption of Dungeness and rock crabs is likely to pose a significant human health risk as a result of high levels of domoic acid. CDFW will continue to coordinate with OEHHA and CDPH to test domoic acid levels in crab along the coast to determine when the fisheries can safely be opened.

Domoic acid is a potent neurotoxin that can accumulate in shellfish, other invertebrates and sometimes fish. It causes illness and can cause death in a variety of birds and marine mammals that consume affected organisms. At low levels, domoic acid exposure can cause nausea, diarrhea and dizziness in humans. At higher levels, it can cause persistent short-term memory loss, seizures, and can in some cases be fatal.

Domoic acid is produced from some species of the marine diatom Pseudo-nitzschia. Currently, a massive toxic bloom of Pseudo-nitzschia has developed, significantly impacting marine life along California’s coast. State scientists have been testing crab from eight fishing ports from Morro Bay to Crescent City, and have determined that the neurotoxin has spread throughout the fishery grounds.

Algal blooms are common, but this one is particularly large and persistent. Warmer ocean water temperatures associated with the El Niño event California is experiencing is likely a major contributing factor to the size and persistence of this bloom.

  # # #

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

Nov 2 2015

California’s Dungeness crab season start in doubt due to toxic algae offshore

Fred Stewart, of Woodland cooks up crab while camping at the Doran Beach campground. Stewart and his family have been camping and crab fishing the past 34 Thanksgiving weekends.

 

With less than a week to go before sport anglers can begin setting traps for Dungeness crab, a persistent bloom of toxic red algae off the Pacific Coast is threatening to disrupt the start of the catch and one of California’s most valuable fisheries.

State officials are awaiting test results they hope will come back by midweek before deciding if they will delay the Nov. 7 recreational start, as well as commercial seasons set to begin a week later, Fish and Wildlife personnel said.

Concern about a powerful neurotoxin called domoic acid produced by certain marine algae is driving the deliberations in California and in other regions, including Washington state, where much of the Dungeness crab fishery was closed through the summer because of high levels of domoic acid found in crustaceans there.

In California, absent current test results to evaluate, “everything kind of is up in the air right now,” state Fish and Wildlife Department spokeswoman Jordan Traverso said Friday.

Overall, algae blooms that peaked in late summer off the California coast are reported to be diminishing, according to Pete Kalvass, senior environmental scientist with state Fish and Wildlife.

But domoic acid levels of even 21 parts per million in crab meat are considered potentially dangerous, Traverso said.

“We don’t know what the next step is until we get results,” said Christy Juhasz, an environmental scientist with the agency.

Barring a delay, the recreational crabbing season will start Saturday, Nov. 7, and can be expected to draw thousands of eager fishermen to the North Coast for what’s become an increasingly popular undertaking, spawning traditions that bring family and friends together, filling campgrounds, boat ramps and bays.

Campsites for the crab opener generally are booked months in advance in anticipation of the first-day scrum.

“We’re busy in the summer, and it used to be just the summer that we had the most interest,” said Willy Vogler, co-owner of Lawson’s Landing on Tomales Bay. “Then, in the last decade or so, November has become like another summer, and it’s primarily due to the Dungeness crab season opening up. … Losing the crab would be bad.”

Commercial crabbers would begin pulling their pots on Sunday, Nov. 15, south of the Sonoma-Mendocino County line, and north of it beginning Tuesday, Dec. 1. After a weak salmon season, they’re raring to go.

“There’s a lot of guys who need to go,” said veteran fisherman Chris Lawson, past president of the Fishermen’s Marketing Association of Bodega Bay. “But the fishermen I’ve talked to — nobody is about to risk our markets by putting a consumer in jeopardy of getting sick from it.”

Scientists and wildlife officials for months have been monitoring a vast red tide up and down the West Coast, with accompanying domoic acid outbreaks affecting everything from California sea lions to seabirds, whales, fish and shellfish.

Though such algal blooms occur with some regularity, the size and density of the one this year has been considered especially alarming. It is believed linked to a band of unusually warm water stretching from Alaska to Mexico that has impacted coastal habitats in myriad ways.

Domoic acid is produced especially by an algae called pseudo-nitzchia that can accumulate in fish and their predators, concentrating up the food chain.

It can be harmful and even fatal if consumed in sufficient quantities.

Symptoms of mild poisoning include vomiting, nausea, diarrhea, abdominal cramps, headache, dizziness and confusion beginning 30 minutes to 24 hours after consuming toxic seafood.

Severe cases may cause difficulty breathing, seizure, coma and even death. Survivors in some cases may experience permanent short-term memory loss.

Cooking or freezing does not destroy domoic acid in shellfish.

Human health advisories are in effect in California warning consumers against eating recreationally harvested mussels, clams and whole scallops harvested off the coasts of Humboldt, Del Norte, Santa Cruz, Monterey and Santa Barbara counties. Also on the no-eat list are commercially or recreationally caught anchovy, sardines and crab from the Central Coast counties.

Public health officials said bivalves, like clams, as well as anchovies and sardines are especially worrisome because the toxin collects in their digestive tracts, and those species typically are not gutted before consumption.

State officials currently are testing Dungeness crab caught out of eight California ports, including Crescent City, Trinidad, Eureka, Fort Bragg, Bodega Bay, San Francisco/Half Moon Bay, Monterey and Morro Bay.

You can reach Staff Writer Mary Callahan at 521-5249 or mary.callahan@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter @MaryCallahanB.

With less than a week to go before sport anglers can begin setting traps for Dungeness crab, a persistent bloom of toxic red algae off the Pacific Coast is threatening to disrupt the start of the catch and one of California’s most valuable fisheries.

State officials are awaiting test results they hope will come back by midweek before deciding if they will delay the Nov. 7 recreational start, as well as commercial seasons set to begin a week later, Fish and Wildlife personnel said.

Concern about a powerful neurotoxin called domoic acid produced by certain marine algae is driving the deliberations in California and in other regions, including Washington state, where much of the Dungeness crab fishery was closed through the summer because of high levels of domoic acid found in crustaceans there.

In California, absent current test results to evaluate, “everything kind of is up in the air right now,” state Fish and Wildlife Department spokeswoman Jordan Traverso said Friday.

Overall, algae blooms that peaked in late summer off the California coast are reported to be diminishing, according to Pete Kalvass, senior environmental scientist with state Fish and Wildlife.

But domoic acid levels of even 21 parts per million in crab meat are considered potentially dangerous, Traverso said.

“We don’t know what the next step is until we get results,” said Christy Juhasz, an environmental scientist with the agency.

Barring a delay, the recreational crabbing season will start Saturday, Nov. 7, and can be expected to draw thousands of eager fishermen to the North Coast for what’s become an increasingly popular undertaking, spawning traditions that bring family and friends together, filling campgrounds, boat ramps and bays.

Campsites for the crab opener generally are booked months in advance in anticipation of the first-day scrum.

“We’re busy in the summer, and it used to be just the summer that we had the most interest,” said Willy Vogler, co-owner of Lawson’s Landing on Tomales Bay. “Then, in the last decade or so, November has become like another summer, and it’s primarily due to the Dungeness crab season opening up. … Losing the crab would be bad.”

Commercial crabbers would begin pulling their pots on Sunday, Nov. 15, south of the Sonoma-Mendocino County line, and north of it beginning Tuesday, Dec. 1. After a weak salmon season, they’re raring to go.

“There’s a lot of guys who need to go,” said veteran fisherman Chris Lawson, past president of the Fishermen’s Marketing Association of Bodega Bay. “But the fishermen I’ve talked to — nobody is about to risk our markets by putting a consumer in jeopardy of getting sick from it.”

Scientists and wildlife officials for months have been monitoring a vast red tide up and down the West Coast, with accompanying domoic acid outbreaks affecting everything from California sea lions to seabirds, whales, fish and shellfish.

Though such algal blooms occur with some regularity, the size and density of the one this year has been considered especially alarming. It is believed linked to a band of unusually warm water stretching from Alaska to Mexico that has impacted coastal habitats in myriad ways.

Domoic acid is produced especially by an algae called pseudo-nitzchia that can accumulate in fish and their predators, concentrating up the food chain.

It can be harmful and even fatal if consumed in sufficient quantities.

Symptoms of mild poisoning include vomiting, nausea, diarrhea, abdominal cramps, headache, dizziness and confusion beginning 30 minutes to 24 hours after consuming toxic seafood.

Severe cases may cause difficulty breathing, seizure, coma and even death. Survivors in some cases may experience permanent short-term memory loss.

Cooking or freezing does not destroy domoic acid in shellfish.

Human health advisories are in effect in California warning consumers against eating recreationally harvested mussels, clams and whole scallops harvested off the coasts of Humboldt, Del Norte, Santa Cruz, Monterey and Santa Barbara counties. Also on the no-eat list are commercially or recreationally caught anchovy, sardines and crab from the Central Coast counties.

Public health officials said bivalves, like clams, as well as anchovies and sardines are especially worrisome because the toxin collects in their digestive tracts, and those species typically are not gutted before consumption.

State officials currently are testing Dungeness crab caught out of eight California ports, including Crescent City, Trinidad, Eureka, Fort Bragg, Bodega Bay, San Francisco/Half Moon Bay, Monterey and Morro Bay.


Read the original post: www.pressdemocrat.com/