A blooming dilemma: Maintaining access to California crab while managing biotoxin health risks

Abstract

The widespread and persistent 2015–16 domoic acid- (DA) producing algal bloom along the US West Coast led to fishery closures, resulting not only in significant economic losses to California's commercial Dungeness and rock crab fisheries, but also substantial social impacts and disruption throughout the seafood system. The closures highlighted the need to identify and evaluate strategies for managing and building resilience to future blooms to minimize losses of access and impacts to the seafood system while protecting public health. Using a mixed methods approach, we integrated semi-structured interviews with insights from participant observation, commercial fisheries data, and other archival materials, to begin to address this need. We evaluated the impacts and implications of recent and potential DA management measures for access to crab by fishermen, seafood handlers, retailers and food service providers, and consumers, and explored strategies to mitigate them. Each of the measures considered — area closures, evisceration orders, depuration requirements, and educational campaigns — was found to have particular and potentially profound impacts and implications for the seafood system and its participants. The latter three measures, which are intended to mitigate the risk of consumer exposure to DA while still providing some access to the fishery and seafood products, differ in who can participate in the fishery, how and by whom the catch can be handled, and the product forms that may be sold. All were considered problematic, with evisceration and depuration expected to affect access by re-distributing opportunities, costs and benefits among fishery participants and communities. Various mitigation strategies may lessen the adverse impacts of these measures, including "normalizing" evisceration and directing resources toward training, product development, and marketing to enable broader fishery and market participation, among others. Further, our findings support a fundamental paradigm shift for addressing this issue from one of fishery resource management to one of food system management, utilizing existing frameworks and systems and making it consistent with how other food contaminant concerns are managed. Ultimately, such a paradigm shift could help mitigate impacts throughout the seafood system while offering a more cost-effective, efficient and equitable means for managing fisheries and DA events.