They eat other invertebrates on the benthic shelf like crustaceans, bivalves, brittle stars, polychaetes, phytobenthos, foraminiferans, annelid worms, and mollusks.

Juvenile snow crabs mature in cold-water pools on the ocean floor that are sustained by melting sea ice.

[7] With a gestation period of up to two years and an average spawn size of up to 100,000 eggs, their fecundity (i.e., fertility) is high, but recent trends have shown that these characteristics do not make them impervious to threats like a warming climate.

[8] The driver of this trend was the northeast Pacific marine heatwave,[9] which contributed to significant die-offs in a number of species.

This decimation of the crustaceans’ population spurred the closing of the Alaska snow crab season for the first time in history, an industry worth approximately $160,000,000 annually.

[10] All these theories tie back to an altogether warmer ocean and are supported by the impacts of low ice delineated in Thoman et al.

[13] The Bering Sea shelf break (a zone where the shallower continental shelf drops off into the North Aleutians Basin) is the dominant driver of primary productivity in the Bering Sea – upwelling brings nutrients from the cold waters of the Aleutian basin to mix in shallow waters.

[13] Warming trends on the outer Bering Sea shelf are concerning for a variety of reasons, one of which being that they may lead to decreased production of large crustacean zooplankton.

It is yet unknown whether the Bering Sea snow crab population will recover, but scientists and policymakers will need to act quickly if improvement is to occur.