Preliminary research on king crab cultivation is underway at the Kodiak fisheries research center. Researchers are raising king crab larvae to juvenile crab with the intent of eventually releasing them to the wild.  Researchers in Alaska and elsewhere have successfully cultivated king crab larvae in laboratories, but little is known about survival rates upon release to the wild.

Currently the Kodiak laboratory is planning on releasing juvenile crab into the waters around Kodiak Island to track their growth and survival rates. At this point the intention of the Kodiak project is to better understand the process and potential issues with the process, rather than to enhance crab stocks. A similar research project was conducted in Japan about 10 years ago. King crab were cultivated in the laboratory and released to the wild as juveniles, but no post-release research was conducted to determine survival rate.

There is a good deal of interest in Alaska crab cultivation, primarily from commercial groups. Alaska’s salmon hatchery programs provide a substantial portion of the Alaska salmon harvest and the long-term success of that program sets a precedent for commercial benefit from industry-funded enhancement programs. For crab, the catch is that there is no data available to estimate survival rate of “cultivated” crab from larval stage to market size. Growth to marketable size takes at least eight years and without survival-rate data, it is difficult (at best) to determine what, if any, potential economic benefit may result from crab cultivation.

Dr. Brad Stevens of NOAA estimates it would take at least 10 years to evaluate success of a crab enhancement project and see adult crab in the market place. It takes about one year for king crab to grow from the larval stage to the point where they are living on the bottom and have a developed shell. At that point they are about 3 millimeters in size.

Scientists have been successful in getting to that point, but knowledge of survival rates beyond that stage is very limited. The key questions to be answered by the Kodiak research are the length of time and the size needed to provide a reasonable chance of survival upon release to the wild, outside of predator avoidance structures.

Crab cultivation is occurring worldwide at various stages and with various species. Scientists in Norway, Russia, Japan, and Chile are actively working on crab cultivation. At this point Japan is the only country to have released cultivated crab into the wild but no follow up research has been conducted to determine survival rates.