While we didn’t enjoy the immense pleasure of visiting Hokkaido, Japan for the 2021 Ecosystem Studies of Subarctic and Arctic Seas (ESSAS) conference this year, there aren’t many better places to have our red king crab research appreciated and understood, even via zoom. I took the above picture at the Sapporo fish market in late 2019 – crabs take up ~1/4 of the advertising space and filled many of the icy displays out front – the island is renowned for its long relationship with crabs, crab dinners, crab exports, crab seasons, crab t-shirts, and so on.

Norway is a relatively new entrant into the red king crab business, and it’s transforming the landscape as well as the seascape. Whether it will come to embrace the crab culture as much as Hokkaido is yet to be known for sure, but there are certainly signs that things are heading in that direction. Here’s my presentation with Melina Kourantidou on the subject – one of the small perks of e-conferences is that the presentations may be more broadly accessible!

For more on the global ecological and economic connections for red king crab (and other Arctic and sub-Arctic crab species), check out our UArctic thematic network!