INACTIVE Barents Sea snow crab - pot/trap (Odyssey Enterprises)

Note: This FIP went inactive on February 1, 2019.

Odyssey Enterprises (Seattle) hosts a fishery improvement project (FIP) for Barents Sea crab with a goal to contribute to fishery readiness for MSC certification.  Odyssey Enterprises is a buyer of Russian snow crab and Russian red king crab.  Red king crab graduated the FIP when the fishery became MSC certified in 2018.  Snow crab entered the MSC program in March 2019. 

Snow and red king crab are invasive species in the Barents Sea ecosystem.  The purpose of the FIP was to contribute improvements to help raise the Barents Sea crab fisheries to the MSC standard.  The FIP unit of assessment is the Russian fishery.  The FIP pre-assessment, planning and tracking have also included Norway due to joint management efforts and the two jurisdictions covering the stock in the Barents Sea.  Despite several moving parts between Russian and Norwegian fisheries, and to recent efforts by other countries to access the stocks, rational management of the crab fisheries has been implemented, and with extraordinary progress year on year.

Overview of the Status of the Crab Fisheries in the Barents Sea

Snow crab and red king crab are invasive species in the Barents Sea.  Today these species are harvested commercially in Russia and Norway by vessels utilizing traps (crab pots).  Snow crab and red king crab are designated as sedentary species within their respective economical zones, which means the crab are managed domestically and not inter-governmentally.  The two countries have a history of cooperating on fishery science and management that has resulted in common principles to manage the crab as a new biological resource across their ranges in the Barents Sea.  In Norway, snow crab is fished partly under quota and partly as an invasive species with unrestricted fishing, depending on the location of fishing. In Russia, both species crab are fished within quotas and other harvest control rules and tools that are based on rational harvesting of the stock.  Russia and Norway operate a joint fisheries management agency and continute to share science. Their fleets no longer fish in each others national waters for crab, as they did until 2017, however.