King crab continues to be in heavy supply on world markets, but the good news for Alaska harvesters is that Japanese buyers don’t really use the very large Barents Sea crab(otherwise known as Alaskan King Crab) a market experts say. “They think they’re monsters,” said John Sackton, president of Seafood.com, who is known as one of the top seafood market analysts and researchers in the wolrd. “That’s one of the reasons all of the Barents Sea crab comes to the U.S.” Says Sackton. A full grown Alaskan King Crab can reach 6 feet in length, and could easily pass for a monster.
A flood of the larger Barents Sea crab harvested illegally by Russian fishermen has recently entered world markets.With the crab industry committed to voluntary retention this year of all legal male king crab, there will be crab with dirty shells which will reduce the overall value of the harvest, Sackton said. Crab with dirty shells that were otherwise legally harvest able were thrown overboard in huge quantities last season. Crab industry officials, still smarting from reports that thousands of legal male red king crab were dumped during the first season of a privatized federal fishery, rallied harvesting cooperatives in August to get a commitment for improved harvest retention. The coming season’s total allowable catch, still to be determined, will be 95.42 percent of what would otherwise have been allowed if this source of mortality did not need to be accounted for.