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Human-induced borealization leads to the collapse of Bering Sea snow crab

Nature Climate Change volume 14, pages 932–935 (2024)Cite this article

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Abstract

The abrupt collapse of the Bering Sea snow crab stock can be explained by rapid borealization that is >98% likely to have been human induced. Strongly boreal conditions are ~200 times more likely now (at 1.0–1.5 °C of warming) than in the pre-industrial climate, while strongly Arctic conditions are now expected in only 8% of years. Stakeholders should accelerate adaptation planning for the complete loss of Arctic characteristics in traditional fishing grounds.

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Fig. 1: The snow crab collapse in the context of Bering Sea borealization.
Fig. 2: Attribution and projection of southeast Bering Sea borealization.

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Data availability

All data necessary for replicating reported results are available in the boreal-opie repository48.

Code availability

All code necessary for replicating reported results is available in the boreal-opie repository48.

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Acknowledgements

J.M.N. was funded by the Cooperative Institute for Climate, Ocean & Ecosystem Studies (CICOES) under NOAA Cooperative Agreement NA20OAR4320271. This is EcoFOCI contribution no. EcoFOCI-1045 and CICOES contribution no. 2023-1324. We thank the many scientists, vessel crew and captains who collected the data used in this study and R. Suryan and C. Szuwalski for helpful input on an earlier version of the manuscript.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. NOAA Alaska Fisheries Science Center, Kodiak, AK, USA

    Michael A. Litzow, Erin J. Fedewa & Emily R. Ryznar

  2. NOAA Northwest Fisheries Science Center, Port Orchard, WA, USA

    Michael J. Malick

  3. Fisheries and Oceans Canada, Institute of Ocean Sciences, Sidney, British Colombia, Canada

    Brendan M. Connors

  4. NOAA Alaska Fisheries Science Center, Seattle, WA, USA

    Lisa Eisner, David G. Kimmel & Jens M. Nielsen

  5. Farallon Institute for Advanced Ecosystem Research, Petaluma, CA, USA

    Trond Kristiansen

  6. Actea Inc., San Francisco, CA, USA

    Trond Kristiansen

  7. Cooperative Institute for Climate, Ocean, and Ecosystem Studies, University of Washington, Seattle, WA, USA

    Jens M. Nielsen

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Contributions

M.A.L. designed the study and wrote the initial draft manuscript. M.A.L., E.J.F., M.J.M. and E.R.R. led the analysis with input from all other authors. E.J.F., B.M.C., L.E., D.G.K., T.K., J.M.N. and E.R.R. collected the data. All authors contributed to the writing and revision of drafts.

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Correspondence to Michael A. Litzow.

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The authors declare no competing interests.

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Nature Climate Change thanks Nick Bond, Arani Chandrapavan and Maria Fossheim for their contribution to the peer review of this work.

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Extended data

Extended Data Fig. 1 Observed annual SST for the eastern Bering Sea (from ERSSTv5), 1854-2022.

Blue trend line is LOESS fit to the data.

Extended Data Fig. 2 Model selection results for models invoking bottom temperature and the borealization index.

Model selection results: Δ AICc scores for models invoking bottom temperature and the borealization index at different candidate lags for female (a) and male snow crab (b). On the x-axis, a value of -1 indicates that the value of the covariate leads the value of the response variable (abundance) by one year.

Extended Data Fig. 3 The relationship between annual SST anomalies and values of the borealization index.

Plotted lines are mean predicted response values from the posterior samples conditioned on 100 values of the explanatory variable, and grey ribbons are 80/90/95% credible intervals from the posterior samples.

Extended Data Fig. 4 Individual time series used in the borealization index.

Dots indicate annual observations and lines link consecutive observations.

Extended Data Fig. 5 Fits of the DFA borealization index to individual time series.

Observed values vs. DFA model-predicted values. The blue line is the best fit for each time series, and numbers in parentheses in the panel labels are R2 values for the fits. Values have been scaled as z-scores.

Extended Data Fig. 6 Snow crab bycatch compared with snow crab abundance.

Survey-estimated biomass of 30-95 mm carapace width males and immature female snow crab compared with estimated bycatch from trawl fisheries.

Extended Data Fig. 7 Sensitivity of autoregressive model results to imputation of missing abundance values from 2020 for female and male snow crab.

Plotted values are two-sided P-values for the effect of borealization on snow crab abundance from Generalized Additive Models using a range of possible 2020 values as autoregressive covariates (that is, for value of covariate \({Y}_{t-1}\), see Methods for details). Vertical dashed lines indicate the actual imputed values used in analysis.

Extended Data Fig. 8 Workflow for conducting attribution analysis of Bering Sea borealization.

In Step 1, an operating model estimating borealization from SST is created with Bayesian regression using observed data (see Extended Data Fig. 3). In Step 2, posteriors from the operating model (including the residual variance) are used to estimate borealization index values corresponding to SST outputs from 23 CMIP6 models run under either preindustrial or historical/SSP5-8.5 conditions. In Step 3, the resulting probability densities for preindustrial and historical/SSP5-8.5 borealization index values are used to estimate the probability of each borealization index observation (1972-2022) under both preindustrial and historical/SSP5-8.5 conditions. These probabilities are then used to calculate the Fraction of Attributable Risk (1 – preindustrial probability / historical probability), with the contribution of each of the 23 CMIP6 models weighted as indicated in Extended Data Table 1. Note that the estimated amount of North Pacific warming (relative to preindustrial climatology) for 15-year windows centered on each observation year is used as the currency for aligning observations with historical or SSP5-8.5 CMIP6 runs (see ref. 26 for details).

Extended Data Table 1 List of the 23 CMIP6 models used in the analysis
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Litzow, M.A., Fedewa, E.J., Malick, M.J. et al. Human-induced borealization leads to the collapse of Bering Sea snow crab. Nat. Clim. Chang. 14, 932–935 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-024-02093-0

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