A whistleblower who once worked with NOAA released a report in 2021 in Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, detailing supposed data falsification and other dishonest activities NOAA conducted. The report claims that “scientific fraud” is why the snow crab population fell to such extreme lows.
The report says that NOAA does not mention overfishing and aggressive scraping of the ocean floor (where snow crabs lay their eggs) as a main reason behind decreasing crab numbers. Instead, they “attributed the sudden loss of millions of crabs to ‘a drastic increase in natural mortality’ and ‘massive die-offs,’ claims for which no evidence ever materialized.”
