Scientists also are scrutinizing the practice of catching undersized crabs and then throwing them back, which could cause death. There is also research and debate about the impact, both in decades past and currently, of trawl nets towed along the bottom by vessels pursuing cod and flatfish species, as well as larger nets deployed by pollock boats that also may hit the bottom.
One former federal biologist, Braxton Dew, in a whistleblower complaint filed in 2021 through Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, alleges that sampling bias and data falsification during some of the surveys in the 1970s “paved the way for the collapse” by giving inflated stock estimates. Based on those surveys, fishery managers approved excessive harvest levels from which the crab populations have yet to recover.