May 25, 2006 — Legions of giant crabs clawing their way along the bottom of the Barents Sea are proving a godsend to the few fishermen authorized to catch the lucrative crustacean, but some fear the crabs are threatening the sea's fragile ecosystem.

The Kamchatka crab, also known as the Alaskan or red king crab, was introduced into the Barents by the Soviets in the 1960s — some 30 years after a first, failed attempt by Stalin — in a bid to bolster Russia's food supplies.

Now, the species is spreading like wildfire along the northern coasts of Russia and Norway and will continue to spread as far as Gibraltar, the southern tip of the European continent, predicts Yuri Illarionovich Orlov, the Russian biologist who first implanted the animal in the Barents Sea.

"But that will take 150 years," he said.

The crabs weigh up to 12 kilograms (26 pounds) and measure up to two meters (6.5 feet) from pincher to pincher. While they remain far from Europe's tourist beaches for the time being, their impact on the environment is already a major cause for concern in the Arctic.

The crabs eat anything they can find on the seabed: fish eggs, snails, clams, shellfish and dead fish.

And to make matters worse, they reproduce at an exceptionally fast rate. A female crab can lay 500,000 eggs at a time, of which one or two percent will become crabs.

"We can't use our nets or our deep lines anymore because the crabs claw them and ruin them," complains Arnulf Bertheussen, a fisherman in the Norwegian Arctic village of Honningsvaag.

"They devour everything in their path. They are creating a desert: the seabeds, they're the Sahara," Bertheussen laments aboard his trawler Goldfish.

Yet the species is protected by diplomatic accords between Norway and Russia, with a bilateral fishing commission deciding how to manage the stocks. For this year, Norway has been granted a quota of 300,000 crabs in its waters and Russia three million.

For the 259 Norwegian fishermen authorized to catch them, crab fishing represents up to 60 percent of their earnings. Sold for 65 kroner ($10) a kilo on the pier, the meaty claws are then resold in shops for about 500 kroner ($82) a kilo.

But, says Bertheussen, who is not authorized to catch crabs, "what is the point of fishing crab for two months if it means that for the remaining 10 months of the year there will be no fish?"

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