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A fisherman brings a delicious nightmare into the Norway King Crab factory in
Bugøynes.


THE KING CRAB KINGS

Stalin, Putin and climate change inadvertently turned Norway’s most desperate
fishing spot into a global seafood capital.

By Andrew S. Lewis
Photographs by Thomas Ekström

29. Mai 2024 um 05:00 MESZ

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Near the end of 1991, the residents of Bugøynes, then a village of about 300
people in Norway’s Arctic north, ran an ad in the national newspaper Dagbladet,
begging somebody to relocate them en masse. Cod and other whitefish, once
Bugøynes’ bread and butter, were disappearing, and no one was quite sure why.
The hamlet’s only fish plant had closed years earlier. The local fishing
industry had essentially collapsed, leaving the villagers near the Russian
border stuck with few ways to earn a living. “The time has come,” their ad read,
“to put everything behind us and start again somewhere else.”

This story was produced with support from the Pulitzer Center in collaboration
with the Food & Environment Reporting Network, a nonprofit investigative news
organization.

One cold afternoon this past February, Leif Ingilæ rolls a cigarette and laughs
hoarsely as he recalls the results. “We got offers from French vineyards to move
all the residents there to pick grapes,” he says. “But we figured if everyone
goes, we would all become alcoholics.” Mostly, the younger generation moved
south in search of work, while the lifers survived on unemployment benefits.
Ingilæ, whose family goes back generations in Bugøynes, first went to sea in
1967, when he was 15 years old. When the newspaper ad ran, it seemed his time in
the area was up; his boat was one of just three anchored in Bugøynes’ harbor.
Still, he stayed. A year later, on a routine fishing trip in Varangerfjord—the
wide, clear fjord that links Bugøynes to the Barents Sea—he found in his gill
net a huge, strange crab.

Its claws were exceptionally muscular, its six legs studded with spikes, its
mouth wreathed with tiny “jaw legs” reminiscent of the Predator. Scores more,
some pushing 25 pounds and with leg spans beyond 5 feet, started appearing in
other people’s nets. The community quickly learned that the crabs’ powerful
limbs could wreak havoc on fishing gear—tangling or tearing nets, stealing bait
from longlines—and that the creatures could devour most any small marine life in
their path. They seemed to be vacuuming the sea clean of the food sources many
whitefish species need to survive, including bivalves, sea stars, even larvae.

A fisherman in Bugøynes, circa 1970s. Photographer: Matti
Saanio/Grenselandmuseet

“We hated them,” Ingilæ says. He called Norway’s Institute of Marine Research
(IMR), which identified the interloper as Paralithodes camtschaticus, the
Kamchatka red king crab. It was an invasive species from Alaska, one that Soviet
researchers had brought to Russia’s side of the Barents Sea decades earlier. It
also happened to be a delicacy, worth billions of dollars a year.

The crab’s popularity with wealthy diners started to change things for Bugøynes.
Its numbers would need to be controlled to prevent it from spreading west and
chewing up Norway’s primary fish stocks, but for the locals here, perhaps it
could take the place of the old cash crops. The Norwegian government established
an experimental crab fishery in the region in 1994 and permitted commercial
fishing of the species about a decade later. The desperate village, as well as
others in the region, began to eke out a living catching crab instead of fish,
alongside a much bigger Russian industry. In the meantime the original stocks of
the crab in Alaska collapsed. An Alaskan fishery had harvested them aggressively
while water temperatures rose beyond what the species could take.



By 2022, Russia controlled 94% of the multibillion-dollar global market. That
was until Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine that February and the US, along with
many of its allies, banned the import of Russian seafood. In the weeks before
the ban took effect, some importers raced to pack their warehouses with frozen
legs and claws. California-based Arctic Seafoods Inc. paid more than $300
million for a massive order of Russian crab, about 6.5 million pounds. It was
also swindled out of 6,000 pounds of that haul, according to an indictment
against a Florida man who allegedly fooled the company by posing as a buyer for
Safeway. (Arctic Seafoods didn’t respond to requests for comment.)

As it turned out, most major US and allied retailers immediately pulled all
Russian seafood from their shelves. Red king crab can be kept frozen for as long
as two years, but the negative publicity didn’t seem worth it. A historical
accident at the intersection of geopolitics and climate change had left only one
place able to sate American appetites for the stuff: Ingilæ’s backyard.

Ingilæ Photographer: Thomas Ekström for Bloomberg Businessweek
Sorting freshly caught crabs by hand. Photographer: Thomas Ekström for Bloomberg
Businessweek


Sitting with legs crossed in the cabin of the same stout 36-foot trawler he’s
owned for four decades, Ingilæ leans the elbow of his smoking hand on a dinette
table. He’s wearing a traditional Norwegian wool sweater, a gray beanie and
black-framed glasses. His face is as creased and ruddy as you’d expect from
someone who’s spent a lifetime at sea. Across the harbor, boats line up at the
dock of the old fish plant, now home to the exporter Norway King Crab. In the
early years of catching the crabs, Ingilæ recalls, he was paid less than 5% of
today’s going rate. This particular morning, Norway King Crab is offering an
all-time high of $27 a pound. It’s selling the catch for close to double that
price.

Now, Ingilæ’s boat is one of 917 in the area. While Russia is still catching
vastly more red king crab (a quota of 28 million pounds last year) than Norway,
the latter exported just about all its haul of 5.4 million pounds in 2023, a 42%
annual increase worth $110 million. At Norwegian prices, US importers want the
crabs alive, because ultrahigh-end restaurants can get far more for them that
way. “We have places that will charge $900, $1,000,” says Roman Tkachenko, chief
executive officer of Direct Source Seafood LLC in Washington state. “The days of
buying [frozen] king crab at 35 bucks and selling it at retail for 45, they’re
gone.”



In Bugøynes there’s no longer talk of a mass exodus. Its fishermen, including
Ingilæ, describe a comfortable life complete with annual vacations to the
Mediterranean or the Caribbean. Whatever doesn’t get exported forms the backbone
of a growing crab-themed tourism industry. For Ingilæ the turnaround has yielded
a rare sight among fishing towns everywhere these days: Both his son and
grandson work on his boat. Today his younger peers can scarcely imagine a time
without the crabs. There are, however, some signs that they might have to.

A fishing vessel making its way back to the Norway King Crab factory.
Photographer: Thomas Ekström for Bloomberg Businessweek

In just three decades, the crabs have gone from scourge to savior. They still
need to be managed as an invasive species, but now that they’ve become a pillar
of the regional economy, the Norwegian government needs to take care to sustain
them, too. Last year, after the IMR discovered a significant decrease in the
weight of adult male crabs, the government cut the 2024 quota by almost 60% and
ordered a two-month pause in fishing from March to May. A generation too young
to remember the Dagbladet ad is getting a taste of the fear Ingilæ remembers
well.

In 1959 the Soviet Union’s aptly Brutalist-sounding Central Commercial
Department for Acclimatization tasked a biologist named Yuri Orlov with
resuscitating an up-to-that-point unsuccessful program, started in 1930 under
Josef Stalin, to develop a red king crab fishery in Russian waters. In 1960,
Orlov and his team plucked nine females from the waters around the Kamchatka
Peninsula, which forms the western edge of the Bering Sea, and placed them in
small plexiglass boxes filled with seawater and chilled with ice. The crabs were
loaded onto a military transport plane and flown across Eurasia to Murmansk, not
far from the Norwegian border. From 1960 to 1969, Orlov oversaw the release of
about 2,500 adult crabs, 10,000 juveniles and 1.5 million larvae into a fjord
that connects Murmansk to the Barents Sea. By the ’90s this Red Army of crabs
had established itself in Varangerfjord, just off the shore of Bugøynes.

At first everyone blamed the cod decline on the red king crab. “People didn’t
need a scientist to convince them,” says Norway King Crab’s CEO, Svein Ruud.
“Cod was going out. King crab was coming in.” The damage the crab caused to
fishing gear was an obvious problem and remains so today. Now, though, the
evidence is a bit more mixed, as Ruud and the fishermen are eager to stress.
Research has indeed shown that mollusks, mussels and scallops disappear from
areas of seafloor where there are large concentrations of red king crab, as do
small forage fish that are a critical food source for cod. Then again, red king
crab are voracious eaters of sea urchin, which had decimated the kelp forests
vital to maintaining the area’s ecosystems.



What seems certain is that the crab isn’t done expanding its territory. “All
indications suggest that this invasive species will spread further north in the
Barents Sea, as well as southwards along the coast of Norway,” IMR researchers
Lis Lindal Jørgensen and Einar Nilssen wrote in 2011. Melina Kourantidou, an
assistant professor at the University of Southern Denmark who’s studied the
economic impacts of the red king crab in the Barents Sea, says the species’
range could be further amplified by shipping, via ballast water, as vessels
increasingly travel once-frozen routes through the Arctic Ocean. “There’s a lot
of concern in the maritime community about invasive species in the Arctic,”
Kourantidou says.

A king crab in Kodiak, Alaska, circa 1970. Source: Wien Collection/Anchorage
Museum

To slow the population’s expansion into other valuable fishing waters, the
government allows unlimited crabbing anywhere near the lucrative whitefish
stocks of the west coast, home to one of the largest cod fisheries in the world.
Still, only residents of Bugøynes’ home county, Finnmark, can obtain commercial
licenses to catch and sell the red king crab, a restriction the Norwegian
government hopes will keep the species both sustainable and contained to the
north. Norway King Crab set up shop in Bugøynes in 2007, Ruud says, because
there was a lot of shuttered fishing infrastructure in Finnmark that could be
repurposed, including the fish factory. “We had all these old buildings with no
activity,” he says. “By then, I had seen live king crabs sold at a very high
price in places around the world, so I said, ‘Let’s do that here.’ ”

On a windy, unseasonably warm morning in Bugøynes, Ruud and his chief operating
officer, Jørn Malinen, walk through the vast holding area of Norway King Crab,
where they keep the catch they buy for a couple of weeks to make sure the crabs
are in shape for shipping. Sixty-one tanks, some as large as 580 gallons, whir
with oxygenated water kept in the red king crab’s ideal temperature range of 35F
to 53F. To the crabs, Malinen says, “they’re more or less Jacuzzis.” It’s also a
bit of a cleanse. Red king crabs can be safely held in tanks for about a month
without food. After a weekslong soak in the filtered seawater while fasting, the
crustaceans, Rudd says, “shit out” any impurities. Then they’re loaded into
portable tanks, trucked to Oslo Airport and flown overnight to Hong Kong, Dubai,
Las Vegas and other cities around the world. Some of the tanks hold 550 pounds
of crab, which will sell for about $100,000 in the fanciest restaurants.

“I think it will be four or five years before the bigger crabs return”

With the same T-bar gun you’d find at the Gap, each crab’s shell is tagged with
a unique QR code that links to a web page showing its weight, the day it was
caught, the name of the person who caught it, more info about their boat and a
90-second video featuring wintry Norwegian scenery. This is partly an assurance
that the crab in question isn’t one of the millions still being shipped from
Russia to China, Japan (which has imposed higher tariffs on Russian goods rather
than banning them) or elsewhere. It’s also superb marketing for the kind of
diners who want to pick out their crabs from a restaurant’s tank. Phil Campbell,
formerly the executive chef at Klaw, a Miami restaurant that built its own
4,000-gallon tank system to hold live red king crab, says customers paying $11
an ounce are hungry for every detail. Some, he says, take the tags home with
them.

Compared with the fleets of Russian “factory ships” that stretch almost 200
feet, Norway’s crab boats are tiny, topping out at 40 feet, and are usually
crewed by one or two people. While this puts a ceiling on how much a captain can
bring in, it also means they’re not splitting the haul many ways. Erling Haugan,
who has a degree in online marketing, came to Bugøynes in 2007 because Norway
King Crab hired him to help in the office, but he soon grew convinced that “the
fishermen were having better days than me.” With zero experience, Haugan bought
his own boat, quit his job and started crabbing. He recently purchased a second
boat for $230,000 and says, if he were to sell it today, it would fetch more
than $350,000. “The income from fishing is good,” he says. “But I’m a little bit
worried, because it’s not good for the environment when you’re taking too much.”

At port, the boxes are hoisted onto shore by a crane and transported into the
processing plant. Photographer: Thomas Ekström for Bloomberg Businessweek
Tagged king crabs ready for delivery. Photographer: Thomas Ekström for Bloomberg
Businessweek


Other fishermen in Bugøynes and elsewhere in Finnmark are selling their catch
not to Norway King Crab but to tourists. For $155, one local company offers
“king crab safaris” consisting of a short boat ride to smaller pots that are
hauled up and opened for customers, who can reach inside and retrieve the
surprisingly docile crabs themselves. Afterward the tourists are whisked off to
a nearby sauna while a cook prepares their catch. At the Snowhotel, where $658
will get you one night in a claustrophobic room made of ice, guests can pay an
additional $244 for a safari on a nearby fjord, where pots are surreptitiously
stocked with live crabs trucked in from Bugøynes and other towns each morning.
Although there’s a population of wild crab in the fjord, there isn’t enough to
satisfy the number of safari guests, says Snowhotel’s king crab manager,
Sten-Roger Seipæjærvi, who estimates that a record 20,000 guests booked the tour
this winter. “In this fjord we cannot get what we need,” he says, “so of course
we have to fill up the pots.”

A bit of a rivalry between Norway’s $17 billion tourism industry and the fishing
boats has grown as crab quotas have tightened. Tourism boosters say every live
experience they sell to a visitor creates more jobs and yields far more money
for the community. Fishermen grumble that the tourism industry wasn’t slapped
with the same two-month pause as the boats selling to Norway King Crab. “This is
stupid,” Haugan says. “It’s the same crab, and tourism is making the same
problems.”

Bugøynes Photographer: Thomas Ekström for Bloomberg Businessweek

Neither group likes to talk about the cautionary tale of Alaska. At its peak in
1966, the US state’s fishery produced 90 million pounds of red king crab, which,
as a species native to that area, didn’t cause similar invasive devastation.
Although they haven’t completely disappeared from the Alaska area (and there
remains a small export business in the seas around Japan), their recovery has
been hindered by significant increases in water temperatures. Norway’s crabs are
at risk of a similar outcome. According to a 2018 study by IMR scientists,
temperatures throughout the Barents Sea’s water column have sharply increased
since the mid-2000s, largely because of retreating sea ice. Rising atmospheric
carbon dioxide also means acidification, which has been shown to have an impact
on red king crab larvae and molting cycles.

Local officials have found a more convenient villain in the black market. In
2019, Norwegian police uncovered a criminal network that was illegally catching
and smuggling almost 100,000 pounds of red king crab worth millions. In 2022
customs officials seized 2,000 pounds of legs and claws from two vehicles
stopped on a highway outside Oslo. “When you have a product that is worth so
much, that’s very enticing for some people,” says Magnus Mæland, the mayor of
Kirkenes, the nearest city to Bugøynes. “Just search Facebook for a little
while, and you’ll find people from the south asking, ‘Can you fix me some king
crab?’ ” Mæland isn’t alone in speculating that crooks might be at least partly
responsible for last year’s decrease in red king crab biomass.



The years of intensive legal fishing haven’t helped, however. Nor have the water
temperatures, which, according to one study of the northern Barents Sea, have
been warming 1.2C to 2C per decade since the 1980s. In 2022, Norwegian and
Russian scientists warned in a joint study that the recent warming in the area
had been unprecedented, albeit less dramatic than in parts of Alaska.

In Bugøynes, quotas are almost always the subject du jour. They’ve created and
destroyed fortunes, as well as made the difference between kids’ leaving for the
cities or staying home. While the village’s new status quo feels less fixed than
it did a year ago, locals are still talking in whens, not ifs. “I think it will
be four or five years before the bigger crabs return,” Ingilæ says. In the
meantime the highest-end restaurants with the wealthiest customers still want to
believe the seafood they eat is as sustainable as is possible in a world where
humans consume 344 billion pounds of fish and shellfish each year.

Tourists fish for their own king crabs. Photographer: Thomas Ekström for
Bloomberg Businessweek
Tourists heading out on their crabbing trip. Photographer: Thomas Ekström for
Bloomberg Businessweek


As the Barents Sea continues to warm, and the war in Ukraine rages on, demand
for Norwegian live crab is likely to intensify in the US. Should the conflict
end and the ban be lifted, Direct Source Seafood’s Tkachenko says, there’s no
doubt American customers will want Russian crab again. The bigger question, he
says, “is if there’s going to be anything left.” Instead of being hurt by the
ban, Tkachenko says, Russia has simply turned to China, which is buying enormous
volumes of live crab.

Campbell, formerly of Klaw, envisions a distribution hub somewhere in the US
with a whole warehouse full of the crab Jacuzzis. Norway King Crab’s Ruud aims
to ship crab at much higher volumes by sea, loading them into the same portable
tanks he uses for his Oslo-bound trucks. On the unseasonably warm winter day
when he gives a tour of the tanks, Ruud later entertains a group of seafood
purveyors, restaurateurs and chefs from Michelin-starred eateries in Zurich.
Having taken a crab safari, including a stop at the sauna and a dip in the 36F
fjord, the Swiss group enjoys the catch, steamed in seawater, at an ultramodern
Nordic‑style home right next to Norway King Crab. Much of the home’s bottom
floor is a test kitchen, built for high-profile visits like this.

Across the harbor, a south wind coming off the mountains rocks Bugøynes’ fishing
boats in their slips. Nearby, a new dock with room for 16 more vessels sits
empty. It was built on the high of 2023’s record quota but before the 2024 cut.
As Ruud’s Swiss guests begin cracking into the pure-white, salty-sweet meat of
their catch—a dinner easily worth thousands of dollars—a local pianist arrives
to play Nobuyuki Tsujii compositions and other classical standards. “If you’re
still hungry, don’t worry,” Ruud tells his guests while they eat. “There is
plenty more crab.”


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