What happened after the Oregon boats unloaded their crab?
Some of it did reach the markets, but the word we had was that they had a real problem selling it because there was such concern about the safety of untested crab. Our argument was that we shouldn’t be putting this crab on the market because we were uncertain about the exact extent of the contaminated areas until we’d done some testing. And that’s what happened. After the testing was done and things looked to be clear, then everybody agreed to go fishing.

They were fishing outside the Farallones?

They were fishing inside the Farallones. Nobody was monitoring them that closely. The state closure only extended for three miles and we couldn’t understand that. With the Coast Guard overflights we know the oil was out as far as eight miles. Why the Coast Guard did not share this information with Fish and Game, or whether Fish and Game chose to ignore it, we are not certain.

If someone had eaten a contaminated crab and gotten sick . . . ?

It would have basically destroyed our markets. And that’s what we were worried about. We tried hard to make sure that crabs were safe and something people enjoyed. We work every year with the Department of Health Services on testing for domoic acid, which is a naturally occurring toxin, to make sure the crab were free of that, and we’ve had closures, and we asked for the closures [for the spill]. At the beginning of one season, over a decade ago, when crab tested positive for domoic acid, the Department of Health Services said they could do an advisory. [Domoic acid affects only the entrails, not the meat, but sometimes the entrails (or “butter”) are eaten.] We said no, we don’t want to risk it. Keep it closed, the crab will be there when they’ve purged this toxin out of their system, the season will just begin a little later.

There has been discussion of IFQs [individual fishing quotas] as a way to manage the crab fishery, and it’s said that has been successful in Alaska with halibut.

The only group that’s been pursuing IFQs that I know is Environmental Defense. And their push has always been to drive everything by market demand. For certain fisheries IFQs can work. For halibut and sablefish in Alaska they work, to an extent--but they require a great deal of regulation. For the crab, because of the nature of the critter, we don’t know each year how much is out there, so it makes it almost impossible to set a quota for it.

The way we’ve been able to manage the crab fishery is to go by what’s known as size, sex, and season, which to date seems to have worked. We are only taking male crabs over a certain size--they’ve been through one spawning cycle, so there’s always a spawning population of male crabs. We do not take female crabs--we only take [the males], or try to anyway, during the time of year when they’re hard-shelled. So if they’re handled carefully and you get one that’s female or undersized, it can be thrown back and survive. That seems to work.

Now we’re increasingly concerned about the sheer number of traps out there, whether that much handling may begin to affect the biology of the crab. There’s also a concern about the recreational fishery: They’re allowed to take undersized crab and female crabs. If that fishery continues to grow and take more and more, there could be a biological problem.

So IFQs for certain fisheries where we have some idea what the biomass is and we can apportion it, that can work--but even there we have to be careful because there’s been a big push on for processors to get quotas of the take. What we’ve ended up with, in so many instances with IFQs, is basically sharecropper fisheries, where nonfishing quota owners lease them out. To prevent that from happening in the Alaska halibut and sablefish fisheries, only the boat owner or crew who actually fish may own or use the fishing quota.