“If we lost the ice, we lost the 2-degree water,” Michael Litzow, manager of the crustacean assessment program at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, told me. “Cold water, it’s their niche — they’re an arctic animal.”
The snow crab can recover in a few years, as long as there are no warm water periods. But if warming trends continue, as scientists predict, marine heat waves will return, putting pressure on the crab population once again.
Bones scatter the wild part of St. Paul Island, like Ezekiel’s Valley in the Old Testament – reindeer ribs, seal teeth, fox thighs, whale vertebrae and skylight bird skulls hide in the grass and along the rocky beaches, evidence of the abundance of wildlife and 200 years of seals kill.
When I went to visit Phil Zavadil, the city manager and Aqualina’s husband, in his office, I found some sea lion shoulder bones on a coffee table. They are called “yes/no” bones and have a fin at the top and a heavy ball at one end. In St. Paul, they function like a magical eight-ball. If you drop one and it falls with the fin pointing to the right, the answer to your question is yes. If it points to the left, the answer is no. A large one read: “City of St. Paul Big-Decision Maker.” The other was labeled “budget bot.”
The city’s long-term health, Zavadil told me, was not yet in a totally dire position when it came to the crab’s sudden loss. It had invested during the heyday of crabbing and on a slightly smaller budget could probably get by for a decade.
If nothing drastic happens. If we don’t have to make drastic cuts,” he said. “Hopefully the crab will come back at some level.”
The easiest economic solution to the collapse of the crab fishery would be to convert the factory to process other fish, Zavadil said. There were some regulatory hurdles, but they were not insurmountable. City leaders also farmed seaweed, sea cucumbers, and sea urchins. That requires finding a market and testing mariculture methods in St. Paul’s waters. The fastest timeline for that was maybe three years, he said. Or they could promote tourism. The island has about 300 tourists a year, most of them hardcore bird watchers.
“But you’re thinking about just doubling that,” he said.
The trick was to stabilize the economy before too many working-age adults left. There were already more jobs than people to fill them. Older people died, younger families moved away.
“Recently someone came to me and said: ‘The village is dying,'” he said, but he didn’t see it that way. There were still people working and many solutions to try.
“There is cause for concern if we do nothing,” he said. “We’re trying to work on things and take action as best we can.”
Aquilina Lestenkof’s cousin, Aaron Lestenkof, is an Island Warden in the Tribal Government, a job that involves monitoring wildlife and overseeing the removal of an endless stream of garbage that washes up on the land. He drove me along a bumpy road along the coast to see the beaches that would soon be noisy and full of seals.