NPFMC SSC October 5, 2026 - Day 1

Respectfully acknowledge.

Over the years, both as a reviewer and also to provide perspective, uh, from the FSC on both sides of the table during our meeting over the last 6 years. Uh, further, we've always appreciated his sense of humor.

Turn over to Councilor— I need to take a break.

Testing. Whoa.

Testing, 1, 2, 3, testing, testing.

Okay, um, so starting off with some admin issues.

Uh, we always like to begin every meeting with a reminder for everyone of the code of conduct for our council meetings. Um, there are flyers outside and should be posted throughout the meeting. Um, and just a reminder for folks that this applies to all council participants, council members, staff, the SSC, AP, and the public. And these are some ground rules that we all hold ourselves accountable to. To ensure that we have professional and respectful interactions.

So we treat everyone with respect, listen and seek to understand differing views or opinions, represent information honestly and openly, refrain from offensive, disrespectful, or derogatory language, and we won't tolerate any personal or organizational attacks or insults.

Uh, also here, just a reminder for the protocols for public testimony. Generally at the SSC, there's 5 minutes, uh, for every testifier. The testimony will be by topic, but you'll note on the e-agenda there are multiple items listed under each agenda item, so that should guide how to sign up for testimony based on how they're listed on the e-agenda. And also just a reminder for folks that this meeting is being recorded.

Uh, so some highlights from the B reports, and these are on the council agenda. Uh, in the executive director's report, we have 2 new appointed council members, Forrest Bowers and Chad C. Um, also there's some plan team nominations that you have just reviewed already, um, and the council will be having a prioritization discussion and there's a discussion paper in the B reports that sets up some framework and some background information for that. And I just wanted to let you all know that there is a section at the end of that paper that just discusses some ongoing efforts from staff to address ongoing efficiency and planning, especially related to SSC agenda time and some constraints that—. With that. So no new plans, just some, some background information on that.

In the NIMS management report, they wanted to highlight a few things. They are—. NIMS staff are exploring an alternative approach for estimating the biomass of Pacific herring in the Eastern Bering Sea to inform the PSC limit of herring in the Bering Sea pollock fishery. They aim to provide the council an update on progress towards that at the February meeting. They also have provided some background information on the blood sablefish product recovery rate and some implementation considerations, as that issue has been highlighted as an agency priority.

And then they wanted to highlight some staffing updates, including some reassignments, new hires, and departures. And this includes that Dr. Jamal Moss, the Deputy Regional Administrator, has been performing the duties of the Alaska Fisheries Science Center Director since mid-August. And Jamal will be here tomorrow morning to introduce himself to you all and make some very brief remarks. And he will also be presenting an oral presentation of the, the Science Center report to the Council.

So your meeting topics at the SSC meeting here in October are crab specifications and groundfish harvest specifications, and for groundfish specifications, it's a little unusual in October that you will be making some final ABC and OFL recommendations on select stocks, and this is based on some kind of catch-up work from last year based on the shutdown. But the Council will not be considering those SSC recommendations until December when they make all recommendations on, on groundfish stocks for the tax setting process.

And then items on the Council agenda that may be of interest to the SSC, they are reviewing the 2027 Observer Annual Deployment Plan, and that will include a review of the CIE review of the ADP.

Moving on to some future meeting planning. So the December meeting will be actually starting November 30th, um, and it'll be back here in the Egan Center in person. Uh, the SSC is scheduled for a 4-day meeting, so that'll bump the council portion to start on Friday and extend a day later. The agenda items for the SSC are final groundfish specs and Norton Sound red king crab specs. And just for your information, we are planning to have a council-only agenda item for Cook Inlet salmon proposed specifications, but the SSC will still review the final specifications at the February meeting.

And then we are hosting a 50th— MSA 50th anniversary reception at the Anchorage Museum as part of that December meeting. Uh, the February meeting is going to be at the Marriott Hotel here in Anchorage. And before everyone panics, we know that the tentative schedule on the 3rd reading outlook right now is pretty overscheduled for the SSC. Um, so the— we'll finalize that after the council has their prioritization discussion.

And then I just wanted to note that the Scientific Coordination Subcommittee is planning the SES 9 meeting that will be in November of 2027 in Florida, and I think you have an internal review or an internal draft of that agenda. Um, so if you want to discuss that, I think there are some, uh, speaker needs specifically for a social science case keynote and a socioeconomic case study. No decisions need to be made yet, but if you wanted to have some discussion about that, uh, you can.

Uh, and then finally, just some miscellaneous items. A reminder to everyone that we do have a call for nominations on our agenda for the SSC, and that'll be open through October 31st. Um, and the council is interested in appointing up to 2 additional SSC members. They'll be prioritizing candidates with stock assessment, statistical design, um, and modern statistical modeling methods, uh, and then either a social scientist with a background in anthropology, sociology, human geography, or related field, or an expert with experience in climate, ecosystem, and integrated thinking. So those nominations are open through October, and then will be discussed, uh, at the December meeting.

Back to this meeting, we're also hosting an Introduction to Specifications Process evening session on Wednesday, so Council staff will provide some background information on the harvest specifications process. And that is the end of my announcements, so I'll turn it back to you.

Thanks, Anna. Does anybody have any questions for Anna?

I think we can take up the, uh, SCS-9 discussion about potential suggestions for case studies, perhaps just by email after this meeting. But be thinking if you have any ideas for potential presentations that you think might be relevant from our region for the SCS-9. We'll be looking for some ideas to forward to that committee.

Martin. Is there sort of a theme or for that meeting established yet?

Yeah, I think the broad theme is strategies for robust and efficient fishery science and management. I think there is an internal draft of the agenda that might have some more specific information.

Thanks. That is—. It seems like a good thing, but pretty broad.

Yeah, we— the draft that we've seen so far was very preliminary, and I guess we haven't distributed that among the full group yet, so maybe we'll check back and see if there's an updated draft and/or a little bit more information for you while you think about potential topics.

Okay, then we will move into member associations. I'll note that we're going to have sort of a rolling cast of people who are going to be virtual for parts or all of this meeting. But we will have— I believe everybody who is currently on the SSC will be here for nearly all or all of the meeting. We will do our best for the people who are connected virtually for parts of the meeting. We'll do our best to monitor questions.

Please be patient if your hand is up for a little while and we haven't noticed it. We'll—. We're trying. So I'll start and we'll also test the remote connections now with member associations. We'll start with Jen Burns.

Go ahead, Jen.

I have no associations.

Audio wasn't great, but I caught no associations. Next, we'll go to Sarah Wise.

No associations.

Thanks, Sarah. And I don't think he's online right now, but Chris Sidden will be online later today or shortly. If you are online, feel free to speak up now, Chris. Otherwise, we will loop back and get Chris's member associations later on. Moving to in-person and in random order to keep you all on your toes, we'll go first to Chris Anderson.

No associations.

Thanks, Chris. Next, Fabio.

No associations. Thanks, Fabio. Next, Curry.

Yeah, myself and my lab do quite a bit of work with AFSC on sablefish, both in terms of stock assessment as well as exploration of alternative harvest control rules.

Thanks, Curry. Next up, Martin.

No associations. Thanks, Martin. Next, Sherri. No associations. Thanks, Sherri.

Next up, Jason.

Two associations. Dr. Cindy Trebizio is my wife, and she's the author of the BSAI Skates assessment. And then I'm also on the DMR workgroup. Thanks, Jason. Next up is Dana.

Yeah, thanks. I have associations with primarily C3 groundfish. I'm a co-author of the Gulf of Alaska Arrowtooth assessment. I'm first or second level supervisor of Elizabeth Siddon, Dan Gaethel, Pete Hulsen, Rob Surian, Cindy Teresio, and Chris Lunsford, co-Plan Team Chair. I'm also married to Clay Shotwell, who is the Bering Sea Plan Team Chair.

GOA-ATF author and co-author of many ESPs. Thanks. Thanks, Dana. We'll probably need that in writing. Next up is Brad.

No associations. Thanks, Brad. Next is Kaylin.

No associations. Thanks, Kaylin. Next up, Franz. No associations. Thanks, Franz.

Next is Andrew. Uh, no associations. Thanks, Andrew. Next up, Allie. No associations.

Thanks, Allie. Next is Rob. No associations. Thanks, Rob. And I think last is myself, and I am also on the DMR Working Group for how the discard mortality rates.

Hopefully I didn't miss anybody. I don't think so. Next, I will hand off to Allie for report writing and deadlines.

Yeah, thanks, Ian. Um, so we're gonna need everyone's, uh, draft sections and your PowerPoint slides, um, by 10:00 AM Thursday morning. Uh, we may try and push that back a little bit if we get through our agenda a little fast and have some time for report writing on Wednesday Thursday afternoon. Um, at 10:00 AM Thursday, um, we'll have the report available for final edits until 6:00 PM Thursday. So please try to, um, prioritize your day around that.

Um, the templates are in the folder and will be ready by the end of the day.

And please let me know if you have any issues.

Thanks, Allie. And we're presenting to the council at time-specific, 1:00 PM on Friday. So we really do need to get the report finished up Thursday evening so we have time to go through things before we present on Friday morning or Friday right after lunch.

Do we have any questions on the agenda timeline, other things before we really dig in here?

Okay, looking good. I think now we will go to our C2 ESR preview. I'll hand back to Council staff to lead us through.

Good morning to the SSC chairs and other members of the SSC. This is, for the record, Anita Kroska. Today I am introducing the agenda item C2, BSAI crab harvest specifications.

Presentations. I thought I'd introduce the, everyone speaking as a whole, and then we'll just keep rolling through the topic today. First, you will hear from Dr. Yvette Sittin here in person, giving a presentation on the ecosystem status report. She presented at the crab plan team crab-relevant information for the Bering Sea with recent available information and preliminary forecasts for '26 and '27.

You will also hear from Katie Peloff, the crab plan team current chair— I almost said co-chair—. And she will be presenting on the final assessments and harvest specifications for several stocks, including Eastern Bering Sea snow crab. Bristol Bay red king crab, Tanner crab, St. Matthew Island blue king crab, and the final rollover harvest specifications for Western Aleutian Island red king crab. You will also hear the balance of the CPT report, including summer trawl survey results, and that will be presented—.

That specific portion of Katie's presentation will be presented by Dr. Emily Reisner. She is working at the AFSC in Kodiak, and she will be presenting virtually for that portion.

Um, and that is all I have. And Anita, if I could interrupt for just a second, I'm sorry, I forgot to note how we were going to do public testimony during this section. Yeah, so maybe, maybe I'll cover that real quickly. So for the public, we're going to have a number of different items here, and we're going to take— we're going to try to move through, um, each of these items have the presentation, have questions, take public testimony on each of the influential scientific information stocks, as well as the ESR itself, and then have our discussion. We're going to do this so that we don't have to stack up a whole bunch of discussions and try to recall from earlier on.

However, for the public, if you'd like to comment on multiple crab stocks at the same time, that's perfectly fine. Go ahead and do that at any opportunity up to the the stocks that you are interested in, and we will note that public testimony for any subsequent stocks that we take up. So feel free to testify anytime or wait for a particular stock. We will be taking separate blocks for public testimony on the ESR, on Bristol Bay red king crab, Tanner crab, snow crab, St. Matthew's blue, and Western Aleutian Islands red, plus the balance of the CPT. So anywhere you see fit in that.

Section. Thanks, Anita. Back to you. Thanks. That, that's all I had.

I'll pass it off to Dr. Yvette Sedin.

Good morning, everyone. My name is Yvette Siddon, and I will be giving the Ecosystem Status Report preview. I am also joined online by Dr. Bridget Ferris and Dr. Ivan Ortiz. So we will have brief overviews from those two LMEs as previews for the GOA, what you'll see for the, from the GOA and AI in December. If there are specific questions, they're available to answer those.

I have a few things to get through this morning. First, I'll have a couple of slides on Alaska-wide climate conditions that'll give us a good getting on the same page of where we've been across Alaska and a few forecast slides of where we think we're going. I will have those ESR previews, one-slide overviews for each of the three LMEs. In that section, I will also highlight for the groundfish stocks that you are setting final ABCs for at this meeting. I will give the ecosystem considerations risk table overviews at that point.

And then I will move into all crab relevant information from then on. I put a yellow star on that slide. I did present to the crab plan team on September 14th. This is a fast and furious time of year at the Alaska Fisheries Science Center. Nearly everything has been updated since the crab plan team, so anywhere you see a yellow star that is updated since crab plan team on the 14th, I'll note now and probably again later, it did not change any of my risk table score recommendations for any of the crab stocks either, but you will just be getting the most recent information.

Okay. We typically start our Alaska-wide climate information with the Aleutian low pressure. That is the dominant atmospheric feature that sets the stage for a lot of the conditions across Alaska. In winter 2025-2026, there was a very weak Aleutian low. We measure it in terms of its strength, which is in the top time series, and its position, because its position east to west can affect wind directions over the Bering Sea.

So the top graph, that high point in 2026 reflects a weak Aleutian low. And if you look back along the time series, it hasn't been that weak since about 2006. Prior to that, 1982, and prior to that in the early '70s. That very weak winter Aleutian low pressure is what set the conditions for cool Arctic air to come over the eastern Bering Sea, the Aleutians, and also the Gulf of Alaska, and is what contributed to the very extensive sea ice that we saw this last winter in the Bering Sea.

All right. Oh boy.

Don't peek. Okay. This slide, uh, we have shown in the past, but I'll walk you through it. This is from Emily Lamagie at the Pacific Marine Environmental Lab. It is monthly sea surface temperature anomalies, wind anomalies, and sea ice.

So in each month figure there. The background heat map is sea surface temperature anomalies. The arrows, which are probably easier to see on your own screen, or if you download the PDF, those are monthly winds relative to climatology winds. And then the gray background, which you can see quite clearly in like March and April, that is sea ice coming down over the Bering Sea. So if we start at the top left last fall, it was quite warm across most of the regions in the Bering Sea.

And then we started to see cooling happen across the fall. By November, in the top right, we had cooler conditions in the central GOA and also in the northern Bering Sea. In winter, that second row, that weak Aleutian low is what contributed to the cooling across the North Pacific, although we did still have warm anomalies in the Aleutian Islands and in Southeast Alaska. By spring, that's when we had a 6-week period of extensive sea ice coming down over the shelf in March and April, and cooler anomalies in the Aleutian Islands, although warmth at depth still persisted in the Aleutians through spring. In the summer, you can see in the heat maps, we still had greater than 2-degree below average sea surface temperatures in the Bering over most of the Bering Sea shelf.

And some— that last bottom right, August 2026, that's a new monthly anomaly figure since crab plan team. We do start to see August warmth in the eastern Gulf of Alaska. And I do wanna point out our interpretation is that is not the impending El Niño coming. There are two sources of warmth in the North Pacific. One is a large body of warm water that has persisted in the central North Pacific since the blob year.

And then there is the El Niño at the equatorial Pacific working its way northward. We believe that warmth in the eastern Gulf is from the warm water in the northern Central Pacific.

Okay. Some projections of sea surface temperatures from the National Multi-Model Ensemble. In the, the title of that slide, there's a couple hot links. If you download the PDF, you can access That first one is for the National Multimodal Ensemble predictions. These update on the 8th of every month, so this is not new since crab planting, but will be later this week if you want to click on that link.

These are the anomalies for, uh, November through January on the top and January through March on the bottom. The left-hand panel are the sea surface temperature anomalies. The right-hand model is the skill— how good do we think we are in that forecast? So More purple colors are better, we're more confident in our prediction for those conditions. If you look on the left-hand panels, the big gray looks like sort of a fish at the equatorial Pacific.

That is the developing El Niño, greater than 2-degree anomalies at the equatorial Pacific.

In Alaska waters, we have relatively, we are predicting warm anomalies, in the central and western North Pacific. Does my arrow work? Oh yeah, okay. All right, north, central North Pacific, western Bering Sea, and western Aleutian Islands. And then we see warmth starting in the eastern Gulf and in the January to March prediction progressing counterclockwise around the Gulf.

We have neutral conditions predicted over much of the Bering Sea shelf and in the Central and Eastern Aleutians in both the November-January as well as the January-March forecasts.

Okay, I have one slide on the upcoming very strong El Niño. It's been— this prediction has been slightly updated since Crabtree and team. It is still a greater than 90% chance of a very strong El Niño, now 75% chance of being the strongest since 1950. We presented at crab plan team and groundfish plan team. It matters in our region whether this El Niño is a central or an eastern Pacific El Niño.

And I've put figures on the right. These are modeled average anomalies in each of those types of El Niños. And you can see that in an eastern Pacific El Niño, we don't, we have some warming, yeah, we might predict in the Gulf, but less so in the Aleutians and Bering. If it were to progress into a Central Pacific El Niño, we see more warmth coming, more warmth in the Gulf and more so into the Aleutians and Bering. At the time of crab planting, this was predicted to be an Eastern Pacific El Niño.

It has progressed. They are now calling it a Central Eastern Pacific El Niño. So we continue to track this as this progresses and we'll bring, you know, we'll know more in December when we come. If, if this El Niño comes, we are anticipating it showing up first in the eastern Gulf of Alaska. It would look like warming surface waters, increased circulation, and prey limitations for seabirds and mammals and potential groundfish distribution shifts.

In the Bering and Aleutians, again, there's greater potential of El Niño effects if it is a Central Pacific El Niño. So we'll see as it develops between now and December. I think one of the most important things, if you, if you take away from this morning, is that in 2026, across all of the regions in Alaska, we had cooling conditions, and I'll get to that next. But as we enter this potential El Niño event, we are entering from a relatively lower heat content. That's different than you hear about in the news, the California Current System.

The California Current System started from a heat wave. And they're seeing El Niño added on top of that. So for us in Alaska, sort of good news, we're starting from a lower heat content with whatever may come from El Niño.

Okay, there are— again, this is another hot link— the full climate update that we presented to the groundfish plan team is available online. There's a few more slides there if you're interested in Gulf and Aleutian, uh, conditions. I'll go through most of what was covered for the Bering today with respect to crab.

And I will go through the previews for the Gulf of Alaska. This is from Dr. Ferris, who's also online if you have questions. But in 2026, ocean conditions in the Gulf of Alaska were cooler or, or cool average or cooler than average at the surface and at depth, which is important in the Gulf of Alaska. And they had good productivity across the food web in terms of contributions to the GOA ESR so far this season. Season.

This is a change from 2025 when there were warmer conditions and lower productivity. The thinking is that this— these cooler and higher productive waters will benefit winter and shelf— winter and spring shelf spawners, age-0 larval survival of Pacific cod, pollock, and northern rock sole. Looking ahead to 2027, the El Niño is still developing, but based on past years, what we would expect to see our warmer surface waters spreading again counterclockwise from the eastern Gulf. Don't know the intensity or duration of the El Niño effect yet. The more intense it is and the longer it lasts, the impacts we expect to see propagate further through the food web and up to things like forage fish, adult groundfish, seabirds, and mammals.

In warm years, the kinds of things we look for would be shifts to smaller phytoplankton and zooplankton communities, the presence of fish more commonly found in the south, like jack mackerel around Kodiak recently, and then increases in groundfish larvae that have warm temperature ranges, like rockfish, and decreases in groundfish larvae that prefer cooler temperatures, like cotton pollock.

Okay, so here's the risk tables. Again, new this year that you're taking up final considerations for a handful of GOA stocks. So GOA Aerotooth, GOA Rexall, and GOA Skates. All of those risk tables received an ecosystem considerations risk level recommendation of a 1. That's based on the good, relatively good conditions that we just described, and the fact that El Niño is not expected to impact the adult stages of these 3 stocks.

Due in part to their ability to switch prey, like in arrowtooth flounder, the deeper range in habitat for all three of those stocks, uh, and in addition, next year's survival of age zero may benefit from increased cross-shelf circulation associated with El Niño.

Okay, one slide preview for the Aleutian Islands from Dr. Ortiz. Uh, similarly, again, in 2026 saw cooling, at least in the sea surface temperatures across the Aleutian chain. Bottom temperatures, heat at depth continued. We had average conditions in the eastern Aleutians, but above average temperatures at depth at the, in the central and western Aleutians. Looking ahead to 2027, warm conditions are expected in the Aleutians regardless of El Niño coming or not.

The potential impacts of warmth in the Aleutians are earlier phenology, faster growth, and higher energy demand for stocks like pollock, peacod, and atka mackerel. The impact of the El Niño will depend on whether it continues as this Central Pacific type, and any warming would be on top of the, the forecasted warm winter in the Aleutians already and heat retention in the region, in the region, which would be in addition to lower fish prey availability that impacts piscivorous fish, reproductive success of piscivorous seabirds and stellar sea lions in the Central and Western Aleutians. There was a risk table in the Aleutian Islands for Bogus Loft Pollock that also received an ecosystem considerations risk level recommendation of 1. That was based on the average temperatures, no marine heatwave conditions during the spawning season, and good condition of small pollock less than 20 centimeters.

Okay, I do have one preview slide for the Bering Sea focused on groundfish, and then I promise we will get to crab. 2026 Was cooler than 2025, especially over the southern shelf. And the rest of this information is, um, indicators that have come in from surveys out, uh, in the region this year. The large copepod and krill abundances are increased, and both large copepods and krill abundances had higher lipid content. That's a good sign for secondary productivity.

The 2025 year class of pollock was high in the northern Bering Sea last year and showed up good in the southern Bering Sea Basis Survey as age 1s, and also age 2+ biomass was high in that survey. So potential indications of a strong recruitment of the 2025 year class. Groundfish condition from the bottom trawl survey over the standard grid this year showed above average for almost every species, And interesting across sort of guilds, so adult pollock, good condition, also several apex predators, Pacific cod, arrowtooth, and Kamchatka flounder, as well as Greenland turbot. And for benthic foragers, including yellowfin sole, flathead, and plaice. Also hot off the press information from St. Paul Island, the female fur seal trip foraging durations were the shortest observed.

That indicates that these fur seals were able to find prey in the near vicinity of St. Paul. So more information on them and the full ESR, but basically bottom line across the board, it's looking like good productivity in the Bering Sea this year.

All right, I'll pause there if there's any questions on the climate or region-specific previews before we switch gears to crab.

Question from Chris.

Pressure. No, this one's kind of off the wall too. There's been a lot of sensationalist articles about the Kelvin wave that's sort of moving up the West Coast. And is that something that is going to impact Alaska as well? And do— is that something you can sort of follow up on and sort of evaluate?

Yeah, I don't know if Dr. Ferris can— if she can unmute. She has been largely tracking and been in communication with the folks tracking the Kelvin waves, so I might defer to her to give you an answer to that.

Oh, she's—. Oh, hi, this is Bridget Ferris. Can you hear me? Yes. Great.

Thank you. Thank you for the question through the chair.

Yes. So I have been— so the Kelvin wave pretty much describes a higher kind of a wave of water that has higher sea surface height that starts at the equator with the El Niño pushing water more to the eastern Pacific and then coming up the West Coast of North America. And it's a mixture of the warmer water and just the physical presence of more water. And so in a way, it's kind of tracking the progress of El Niño's physical conditions coming up the coast. And so that has been in the news.

One person who has been monitoring and studying that, Dylan Amaya, I've been working with him to ask those questions. If this increase in sea surface height, it dissipates as it comes north on the coast, if it is kind of trackable once it gets to Alaska, even if it could be an early warning in a way of when we might see some of these warmer waters. To be determined, and I hope to have more to report to you in December, both kind of the answer to that question and if we can in fact develop some quick tool to kind of watch it in our waters. I'm not sure by the time— while we do see El Niño impact sometimes in the Gulf of Alaska, I'm not sure if that change in sea surface height is as relevant as it is with this Kelvin wave in California, or if it dissipates to become less of an informative tool by the time we get to Alaska waters.

Thank you. Chris.

Assuming I've put together the different statements in these slides correctly, there's a lot of statements here about sea surface temperature and how the El Niño is going to affect that. What is known or understood or thought to occur at, at deeper levels in the cold pool?

Thank you for the question. Through the chair, I will get to bottom temperatures in the Bering Sea-specific slides next, relevant to crab. And then some of the new modeling efforts with the MOM-6 will be able to give bottom temperature information for the Aleutians and Gulf more so than we've had in the past, especially in years when we don't have surveys. But I'll focus on the Bering Sea today.

Okay, let's get to crab. All right, just a reminder that if both ESR and an ecosystem and socioeconomic profile are available for a particular stock. Those leads work together to inform the risk table for each individual stock. So for this meeting, uh, worked with Dr. Erin Fidua on the risk tables for snow and Bristol Bay red king crab. There was no ESP for Tanner crab, but Dr. Clay Shotwell did provide some socioeconomic indicators to Dr. Stockhausen for that assessment.

Again, I, um, all of those Ecosystem considerations risk level recommendations were a level 1 back when we provided them, and with the updated information I'm providing today, I'm still recommending a risk level of 1 for these stocks. All right, this is the framework that the ecosystem status report team uses when we go through any risk table. So we look at these 4 categories of indicators and then look at them relevant to specific— whatever the specific stock is. For crab, I'll be presenting information separately for the pelagic stage versus the benthic stage because, uh, those could be different indicators with different trends, obviously, in the water column or down on the bottom. So I'll try to point out as we go through, most of the information that I have today is in the environmental processes section, so I'll spend more time here and then things will move faster through prey competitors and predators.

All right, I will start with sea ice. You have seen this plot before, but on the x-axis there is the date, and on the y-axis is the sea ice extent. This is a figure from Rick Thoman at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. It does track sea ice both western and eastern Bering Sea, but it still provides some good trends for our region. So you can see in the red circle I've put there that sea ice was largely below average in the beginning of '25, winter '25-'26.

That's the blue line, sorry. The green line is the previous winter. The thick black is the median. So we actually had below average sea ice going into winter '25-'26. It wasn't until this 6-week period between March and April that we had both temperature and wind conditions that allowed extensive sea ice over the shelf.

It came down fast all the way to the Aleutian Islands and into Bristol Bay. But that ice was thin so that when it started to retreat, it retreated quickly beginning in mid-April. By late April, it was again below average.

We also provide information to the plan team on winds. We track this in monthly anomalies. This can affect transport of the pelagic stages. So first, I'm saying 2025 at the top. I did look back basically since 2021 through 2025.

Summer winds, so the June, July, and August anomalies there circled on the top, were on-shelf, which may have favored retaining the pelagic crab stages over the shelf and over suitable benthic habitat. That is different from what we saw in 2026. This has been updated now to also provide summer anomalies for 2026, and you can see May, June, July, and August, largely off-shelf transport would have been favored that may have dispersed the pelagic crab stages away from the benthic habitat.

Now looking at sea surface temperatures, uh, this is a tracker. Again, another link there in the bottom left. This is available, you can click on the link and it updates in real time. So you can look at how '26 is shaping up compared to '25, compared to the mean 1991 to 2020. So starting in the southern Bering Sea on the left, uh, conditions in '26 were colder than in '25, especially January to April, and also largely below average for most of the year.

If you look at the black line relative to the purple on the left-hand plot. We had no marine heatwave conditions over the southern Bering Sea shelf. And I'll note that the bottom trawl survey had surface and bottom temperatures that were within one standard deviation of their survey time series. For the northern Bering Sea on the right-hand side of that plot, really near average in '26, January to June. We did see above average temperatures in the summer in the northern Bering Sea, but not warm enough to tick into heatwave conditions.

And then Nuisance Plan Team temperatures through September have really gone back to average, both southern and northern Bering Sea.

All right, here's our bottom temperatures and cold pool extent. On the left-hand side, these are survey observed bottom temperatures over the standard grid of the bottom trawl survey, starting in 2007, going to 2026 in the lower right. So you can see the extensive cold pool this last summer, and the temperature thresholds are on the right there. They measure it, the size of the cold pool, less than 2 degrees, less than 1 degree, and less than 0. Those are all sort of biologically important thresholds for different species as well.

And then the time series on the right is the less than 2-degree cold pool. So the less than 2-degree cold pool is the largest it has been since 2012. The less than 0-degree cold pool is the largest since 2013. Green, and the bottom temperatures in 2026 most similar to, um, 1986, '92, 2006, and 2010. I also am going to show you comparisons of heat maps.

On the left are the survey-observed bottom temperatures for the last 4 years of surveys, and on the right are, uh, modeled bottom temperatures from the new MOM6 model. In 2024 and '26, we did not have a northern extension of the bottom trawl survey, so we can utilize the MOM-6 modeled bottom temperatures to look at how conditions may have been over the northern Bering Sea shelf in those years. So both '24 and '26 have really cold bottom waters south of St. Lawrence Island and between St. Lawrence and Norton Sound, colder than '23 and '25, respectively.

This is a freeze-up forecast, uh, from the Climate Prediction Center. And the bottom left, that is a link to a sea ice tracker that we developed separate from the Climate Prediction Center, but it is live. You can go and look at sea ice in 4 regions. We've broken it up. You can look at sea ice development over the Southern Shelf, over the Northern Shelf, over the entire east— just eastern Bering Sea Shelf, and then also in the Arctic.

You can look at sea ice extent, and you can also look at ice thickness, and that should update automatically, uh, within a day, basically, on that sea ice tracker. The forecast is based on a model ensemble and looking at when ice should arrive in places where ice arrives over the Bering Sea Shelf, and that forecast is showing uh, later than expected over the northern Bering Sea, but earlier than average over the southern Bering Sea. That's because right now the northern Bering Sea was warmer, so it's going to take longer to cool that system down and for ice to form. But the southern Bering Sea has been cold, so once that ice starts to form and come down over the shelf, it will be able to advance relatively quickly over the southern shelf.

All right. Also looking, we track two indicators for ocean acidification, both pH and aragonite saturation. On the time series on the left, the pH is in orange and aragonite saturation level is in blue. This was also updated since Crab Plant Team.

At the time of Crab Plant Team, it was a modeled forecast with a persistence forecast that actually showed improvement in pH. Over the shelf. Now that we have observed hindcasts, we see a continued decline in pH over the shelf. That switch from an increase to a decrease largely driven by the very low pH you can see at the Yukon Delta river mouth and in Norton Sound. Some also negative anomalies along the southern outer shelf, but that region in Norton Sound really driving the the shelf-wide average down for pH.

This is on top of a continued multi-decadal decreasing trend. And while I flag this for you now, I think this will largely be flagged in the Norton Sound red king crab coming up in December as a red flag, but not for any of the stocks you have in front of you this week.

Okay, moving to prey. I have— or do we want to pause?

We'll keep going. All right, I think there's only one slide on prey. The top, uh, time series is the indicator that we have for pelagic stage prey. This is looking at large diatoms from the continuous plankton recorder. It's one year lagged, so the most recent year of data available is 2025, but showing Positive anomalies 2023 through 2025 indicate above-average feeding conditions for those pelagic crab stages for those years.

The bottom two time series are indicators of prey for adult or benthic stages of crab. We track sponges. Those have been low and continued low. Uh, this was updated for 2026, but still near zero relative to 2025 at crab planting. A change in the indicator for the— we used the benthic forager biomass guild.

This is a suite of largely smallmouth flatfishes on the bottom. We used them as an indirect indicator of what prey might also be available for the crab stages because we don't have any direct indicators of benthic infauna. It had been quite low, but when we got the 2026 data, that the biomass of those benthic foragers has increased, and that has tickled that time series up to average. So maybe improved conditions for the benthic stages of crab on the bottom. So showing that change on with the star there.

Moving to competitors of these different stages, first looking at pelagic competitors and using zooplankton as those pelagic competitors. We had two surveys. We had spring surveys and, and summer fall surveys in the Bering Spring surveys, uh, sort of average abundance of the small copepods shown on the top right of the time series, and below average in the spring of large copepods shown on the bottom right, and the spatial maps on the left there. But by summer, uh, the small copepods all remain below average, but the large copepods have increased, not uncommon or not unexpected to see because it was such a cold year out there, but that large copepod increase, a good sign for some groundfish indicators coming up in December. That's— we have not seen a large copepod abundance that high since 2015.

All right, for competitors for our benthic stages, we use the Motile Epifauna Guild. This is includes sea stars, brittle stars, cucumbers, as well as the commercial crab species.

The brittle stars have been like more than 50% of the biomass of this guild for over a decade, and they continue to stay pretty high. The guild as a whole did decrease from '25 to '26, but remains above 1 standard deviation above that time series. So competition for space may still be high on the bottom.

And lastly, looking at predators for the different stages. So indicators of pelagic predation on the zoal stages were mixed for 2026. For those, we look at the pelagic forager biomass guild on the top here. That guild is largely driven by pollock. Uh, it had been low in '25, but with the increase in pollock biomass in the survey, that has increased to average.

Showing potential increase in predation pressure from pollock, but a decrease in salmon, uh, the Bristol Bay sockeye forecast being below the 10-year average there. For the benthic stages of predators on the bottom, we look at the apex predator biomass. This guild is driven largely by Pacific cod. That biomass also ticked up a little bit but remains below average. And then the Pacific cod condition, which I'm not showing, was above average in '26, but their biomass being below average.

And then we have new information from the Food Habits Lab on the bottom here. This is Pacific cod consumption of snow and tanner crabs. That has been similar from '23 to '26, so no big increases or red flags there.

All right, this slide is just a summary. I won't read it to you. The stars are where my arrows may have changed a little bit for the benthic stage prey, an increase because of the guild increase from the benthic forager guild, and then the pelagic predation sort of downgraded to neutral with the increase in pollock biomass offset by maybe the salmon. Decrease. And that is all I have.

The full presentation that I gave to the crab plan team is available there. And with that, I can take any questions.

Thanks for walking us through that, Yvette.

I have one question with regard to the benthic foragers. Is the thinking there that that's a bottom-up process where increased prey availability will drive increased benthic foragers, as opposed to benthic foragers being up and therefore potentially being more competition for crab? Could you, could you just walk us through that? Yeah, I mean, it could be both, certainly, uh, because we don't have any indicators of infaunal prey I've used it to try to get a sense of how the benthic conditions might be doing, like in combination with the fact that also those flatfish's condition is up, to me saying there's enough prey out there for the fish to be in good condition, maybe good condition for crab as well.

Franz. Yeah, thanks for the presentation. I was wondering about the zooplankton time series and trying to wrap my head around the, like, the large copepods being pretty low in the spring but high in the fall. Is that something that, you know, is expected if you're coming out of a kind of a warm period? I would expect it to be maybe first higher in the spring and that carry over into fall, so I'm not sure what to make of that, or is that just within the noise?

I think it has to do with the life cycle of the zooplankton species. I think it's not atypical for them to be low in the spring and higher in the fall, just based on their life cycles.

Chris, can you please help an economist understand the What it means for competition for space to, to be high, um, I'm, I'm just not sure that I'm, I'm grokking what's being competed for there. Thank you through the chair. Uh, when we think about competition, I mean, in those 4 buckets, when we try to go through our risk tables thinking about what could potentially impact crab. That's the sort of indicator we have that might be relevant. I don't know that space is limiting on the bottom, and until we did a study or somehow looked at that, no way to know.

But I raise it just to say it has been high and has remained high for quite a while. From there, you know, I— not to make strong connections and But to raise it as a maybe we should look into it or at least keep our finger on it in terms of what could be going on on the bottom.

And what—. With what are the crabs competing for space? And what kind of space is it? Is it— well, I mean, I think—. Yeah, I mean, could just be physical space out there.

I don't know how, you know, how crowded is the bottom.

And then also presumably feeding on the same kinds of infaunal prey. So it's the more that are out there, the more things that are competing for space and food resources.

Jason.

Yeah, thanks, Yvette, for the presentation. I'm curious about this, the trend in the sponges. I've noticed, you know, you had two high periods in there, and then fairly low, I guess. I'm—. I think the contribution from the Groundfish Assessment Program is quite clear to say we really don't have a lot of information on sponge biology in the Bering Sea, but it is something that they can track, and it is noted as something that, uh, crab eat.

So we present it. Again, hard to know without direct research looking into its driver.

Curry. Yeah, thank you for your presentation. I was really interested in sort of learning a bit more about the sort of Eastern Pacific versus Central Pacific El Niño based on the implications for Gulf of Alaska temperature. And it, if I understood correctly, it seemed like a few weeks ago it seemed more eastern and now it's central eastern. When will we know and therefore have a better idea of what the Gulf temperatures likely to look like?

Yeah, I mean, I think this, uh, maybe another take-home, like, this El Niño is still developing. So we, we're tracking it. It's part of what changed from Groundfish Plan Team to now is the spreading of that warmth at the equatorial Pacific. So it has spread beyond the first confined area that would, would designate it as an eastern Pacific. It is spreading.

And now we just track it, you know, is that going to continue? And we'll see what we In the— I mean, the expectation is we would start to see the impacts of that in the fall in the Eastern Gulf. So that's why I want to make the point, like, the August heat now is not the El Niño coming, but it's still in the fall coming to Eastern Gulf. We'll have more in December.

Okay, see no further questions. Thanks for your presentation.

We will have an open period now for public comment on the ESR specifically. I'll note that we've received 2 written public comments on the CRAB specs, and so those can be considered by everyone who's reviewing CRAB and all the various sections are sort of overarching. So if there, if there is public testimony on specifically on the ESR, we can take that now.

I'm not seeing any signups, so I'll turn back over to staff and we'll keep— sorry, actually, I think we won't. We will take our discussion for the ESR and then we'll go back to the crowd plan team report. Sorry, Katie. So our two leads for the ESR, we'll start with Jen Burns.

All right, give me just a second. Hopefully you can hear me better this time. We can, much better, thanks. Okay, sorry for not being there to do this in person.

And a little stutter still, but let's give this a go. We have a ESR presentation by Elizabeth Sidden presenting both on, we've got overall of the three regions and then crab-specific data relative to the Bering Sea to inform our discussions later today.

The overall I mean, I guess from my perspective, short of summarizing everything, we have overall trends in the region of cooler or near average thermal conditions across the region that are setting Alaska up a little bit more favorably for the coming large El Niño. Than say our California compatriots. Um, we heard, um, overview of Alaska-wide conditions in each of the large marine ecosystems, um, and, um, updated, uh, crab-relevant ecosystem indicators, um, modified since the most recent crab planning team report. Um, overall, The impact on eco— on the overall, the climate impact seems to be that there's above average with the cooler temperatures. Sorry, I'm still scattered today.

With the cooler temperatures or average temperatures, we've have good foraging conditions over the past year moving into this coming year. Pelagic above average diatom abundances in the region setting up good foraging conditions for crab larvae and reasonable good conditions also, or average conditions for habitat quality. From the perspective of prey situations for adult crab as well.

The— from a competition perspective, we heard that there was relatively low evidence of pelagic competition in the spring, and in the fall, competition was driven by large copepods, but that is— those are good things for the crabs. Larvae and their decrease in mobile epifauna, or sorry, increase in mobile epifauna and competition, potential competition for space, although what that competition is remains a bit unclear for the adult crabs.

And overall, I think the ecosystem status report indicates that we are going into the coming year in relatively average conditions or good conditions given what's coming with El Niño, and that the ecosystem conditions across the board, well out, are, I guess I would say, more hopeful than I would have expected. So given what I've been reading in the press and following, so that is my disjointed report.

Thanks, Jen. Next, we'll go to Chris.

Yeah, Jen, I don't envy your job of having to synthesize this into something that's not as disjointed. There's a lot of different threads here, but I want to really express some appreciation to the authors for synthesizing and tracking all this data, which provides us a really important backdrop and context for what we're, we're seeing in the waters off Alaska and in particular what they mean for crab.

I support what Jen has said here, and basically we seem to have been in pretty good conditions this year because things have cooled off. We've enjoyed some injection of primary productivity from expanding sea ice that we realized during this cooler year, and that adds some buffers for us based on whatever energy injection we get from this, this big El Niño. And likewise, I took away the sense that things seem to be improving towards, towards a normal or average conditions that will support increases in crab stocks, growing crab stocks into this year.

Mm-hmm. Thank you.

Thanks, Chris. Comments from others on the SSC?

Rob, go ahead.

Yeah, thanks. I just thought about adding just a couple other things that really stood out for me. And yeah, thanks, Yvette, for this and the other co-authors for this presentation. And just specific to the Bering Sea, since we're going to be talking about crabs next. I think it's really nice to see some favorable conditions that we have not seen in recent years.

I think it's still very important to note that this— you hear a lot of conversation about extensive ice in the Bering Sea this past winter, and I think Yvette highlighted very nicely that it was extensive sea ice for a few months in the spring and that it receded very rapidly. So I think it is interesting to know, like the question Franz had about the zooplankton. So the spring conditions look like what we've been seeing for the past decade almost, but it's the fall conditions that looked a little bit different. So, and also the extent of the cold pool. Are very different.

So I think that's very positive, but it's also just keep in mind it's different than what we've seen before too. And then just, I think, just a comment on Martin's question too, as far as the Kelvin wave. I mean, just, it's great that oceanography is becoming a public discussion, but Rossby and Kelvin waves are just standard oceanographic processes, and it's nothing unusual about this the El Niño, but it is one way to track water movement and subsurface waves throughout the oceans. Thanks.

Bronze.

Yeah, thanks. I just, I was wondering if we want to maybe just add kudos or comment on the sort of increasing development of some of the tools to serve up some of the climate indices that I find pretty useful. Like, I think there was a new link here to, like, CI's extent that are— you know, there's so many websites where you can look up this stuff and get the information, but it's always hard to get it for a specific region or to tailor it to a specific purpose. And these are kind of custom-made for the regions that we're interested in. So I would would, you know, encourage the development of those kinds of tools on the climate side and maybe eventually on the biology side.

Okay, seeing no more comments, I'll just summarize briefly. Uh, we will thank the authors and Yvette for the presentation. This is always a very helpful part of our review, both for crab and this year for some of our groundfish stocks. Overall, we'll note that the, the trends toward cooler or at least average conditions setting up, setting us up perhaps more favorably for El Niño than areas farther south. We'll note the suite of relevant groundfish and crab indicators.

Note that the cold pool and the sea ice extent in the Bering Sea was good relative to recent— what we've seen over recent years, but that this lasted only for a few months. We'll note the climate impacts, including cooler to average temperatures, likely resulting in good foraging conditions, good to average conditions for habitat quality, increase in mobile epifauna, and potential competition for space for crab.

We will I guess highlight that we've seen this improvement toward perhaps more average conditions, and that although it's good to see better conditions than we've been used to seeing in the last couple reports, the fall conditions still look somewhat different, and that this year, despite some improving trends, is different than we've seen in historical years of similar, say, cold pool or ice coverage And then finally, we'll support the continued development of the new tools that we were shown here for reporting these climate indices and maybe some further extensions towards some similar tools for the biology.

Okay, that concludes ESR, and now I really will turn it back to staff for— to continue us on with our crab items.

Good morning, members of the SSE. As Anita said, I'm Katie Paloff, the current loan co-chair of the CRAB plan team. I'm trying to see if I can get that bottom bar to go away, but I don't know if it's going to.

Anyways, so I'm here today to present to you our meeting minutes from our September plan team that we had in person in Seattle.

In September. And just to kind of reiterate that I am currently co-chairing on my own, so we're still looking for a crab plan team co-chair, and we'll bring that up in one of the slides here on, on CPT updates. So with that, I'll get started here. I have a couple introductory slides including just reorienting everyone to where we are with crab, and then also what we covered at our September plan team. And then I will turn this over to Emily Reisner, who will do the survey slides for crab.

That's something that's typically done by that, that survey group, but it is part of our presentation here. And then I'll jump back. I will say that before we get into Emily's conversation on, on the survey slides, we will have a slide at the end of the survey that is like the CPT recommendations for the survey presentation. So Emily can field questions that are related to the survey or anything from the Kodiak Lab or survey group, but any questions on the CPTs conversation discussion will— I will field at the end of that. So just let everyone know that.

So this talk kind of covers all the crab stocks and the timing that we do them. We're in that middle box here where we have Snow, Tanner, and Bristol Bay red king crab on an annual basis, and then this year we will— we do see St. Matthew blue king crab, which is on a biannual basis every even year. And then we also have West Revolution Island red king crab rollover spec this year. We'll see a complete save for that in 2027. I realized this error when I was looking at this last night, but I didn't have time to correct it.

The top box there, the Pribilof Island golden king crab stock will be up next in 2029, and the Western Aleutian red crab is 2027. Those two tags were kind of, um, were mixed up, so there, sorry. And then we do have Norton Sound red king crab that we'll do in a November virtual meeting, and briefly do the specifications for that at your December council meeting. So I did throw up here, as I have in previous presentations, the tiers for crab. This kind of comes into play as we continue down my presentation today, especially when we talk about snow crab.

We are, kind of spoiler alert, recommending the fallback smoother for snow crab here, as we did— well, we didn't, as we used last year. And there was some discussion at plan team at kind of the difference between between tiers, what Tier 4 actually means, and kind of the need for this, this fallback kind of somewhere between Tier 4 and 5, and we don't really have anything for that. So there was some discussion there on what we should call it, and, and if you listen to the plan team, but I just wanted to be clear that right now we're just going to refer to it as a fallback RIMA smoother and not necessarily a Tier 4 assessment, because technically it's according to the FMP, a Tier 4 assessment involves an assessment of the population dynamics of the stock where you also account for fishery removals, and a smoother doesn't really do that. So just kind of spoiler alert, we'll get to that later in more detail. Our September agenda, agenda covered all these topics.

We tried to keep the topics pretty pertinent to those that we needed for the final SAFE specifications, kind of due to the lack of a co-chair. We didn't want to have a lot of extra topics on there that we would have to to deal with. I realize the bottom of the slide is not showing because of that bar, sorry about that, but there you go. We have, we'll have, like I said, summer trawl survey results that Emily Risner will present, then there will be one slide on the CPT kind of recommendations discussions from those, which I can field questions on that. The fishery season for all the crabs will kind of be taken up individually for each of the stocks, We'll have a brief summary for those.

You'll see the, the 3 stocks, both Snow and Bristol Bay, we have an ESP report card that we'll present kind of briefly on. There is one for Tanner crab, but it was not able to be completed in this year, so we do not have that for Tanner crab, but we do have information feeding into the, the draft risk table process for Tanner crab. We'll have the Reston, Reston Early Chinellen red king crab rollover specification, and then overfishing updates on the other stocks. You already saw the ecosystem status report highlights that we saw at plan team, and then there was a number of other kind of research updates and other topics that the CPT took up. In addition, just if you were listening, we did provide a request from ADF&G, a review of hatchery permit for St. Paul, and that was just an informational and also request for ADF&G just to have more experts have eyes on that permit.

It's not something that will elevate further in, in today's or further council presentations. Uh, let's see, right? I think I have one more slide and then I'll, I'll throw this to Emily. Uh, just a couple of CPT updates that I wanted to point out at the front instead of at the end of the presentation, just to kind of keep everyone in mind of where we're at. Uh, we do have a vacant co-chair position.

We, We had two folks, Andrew Olson and Erin Fidewa, who helped co-vice chair this meeting, which means that they helped a little bit with— help some with admin, like minute assignments, putting together minutes, editing minutes, and some of the presentation that you see here today. They helped put that together, but we still— that doesn't, you know, make up for lacking a co-chair and helping to lead the meeting and just like help with general plan team discussion and direction. We also have an ADF&G management vacancy. Ethan Nichols, who was in our Dutch Harbor office, moved on to a different position. CPT would like to thank him for all his contributions to the plan team.

The hope is that that position would be filled by his replacement, and that will hopefully happen before April meeting. And then just general, we've been kind of hoping for a little bit more quantitative expertise on CPT, so general vacancy there. We did— there was approval, as I think it was already pointed out, merging the crab and scallop plan team with the new proposed name as crab and scallop plan team. I was hoping for something more creative, but it didn't happen. That's our new proposed name.

And then just to kind of highlight for all of you that we had told you that we would have good GMAX documentation at our April meeting, and we did. Buck Stockhausen provided a good update on that. There was some updates to GMAX that have been done since our— well, I guess it was May last year, will be April meeting. And so we do have a section in our minutes for that, and we'll try to continue to have a section that will either have a summary of GMAX updates or link to where that summary occurred. Buck Stockhausen was able to put together a presentation that's on the Plan Team agenda that kind of goes through each of his iterations and some of the details if you're, if you're really interested in some of those GMAX updates.

But just wanted to reiterate that to you guys here. And I think with that, I will— Emily's joining us virtually, and I will toss this to her to go over the survey results. And just kind of a quick reminder, I'll have one slide when she's done that will be the CPT discussion and recommendations from that.

Thanks, Katie. One question before you go on, just to be clear, we, we discussed earlier this morning the current plan team nomination that's on the table, but to be clear, even with a new plan team member being added, you are still down plan team members. And so this— your recommendation that you still need more general quantitative expertise on the CRAB plan team is in addition to the nomination that we discussed this morning. Is that correct? Through the chair, yes.

So that plan team nomination will replace Cody Swalski on the plan team. So Cody is stepping down from the plan team, so it's not an additional person, it's just kind of a replacement of someone who's existing. So we're still looking. Yeah, I think one of our big struggles is André Punt provides a lot of feedback, but he can't attend our September meeting. So it's, you know, someone maybe outside of the assessment author.

We have explored potentially other academic contributions to Plan Team, and we have a couple names from, um, for that, like labs that we can maybe reach out to, but we haven't, um, we don't have any current folks that we're ready to nominate yet for that, or anybody. Curry, go ahead. Yeah, real quickly while we were on the topic, um, I saw this came up in, in the Tanner Crab, uh, data gaps, research priorities, the transition of GMAX from ADMB to RTMB, and I appreciate that the sort of frequent updates on GMAX. Is there a plan for that? Is it underway?

Is there somebody who's being paid to do that, or it's— I'm just sort of curious where that's at. Great question. I, at some point in time, through the chair, sorry, Buck Stockhausen was working, was taken to take that on, but I don't think there's been much progress on that because he's really been focusing on getting Tanner Crabbe in GMAX.

And it sounded like him and Grant, who's the new Snow Crab author, were going to work on that. But I don't think there's been any updates on that since we briefly talked about it at our January modeling workshop. It is something that we can touch base— well, we have a pretty large amount of things that we've been adding to our January modeling workshop, if you looked at the minutes. So I don't know if we'll get much progress on it, but maybe we can get a better idea from Buck and Grant if what the progress on that is and what they're prioritization and time allowed to spend on that is. Okay, thank you.

Dana. Yeah, thanks, Katie. With the absorption of the scallop plan team, are you getting any of those members?

Through the chair at that time, right now, Tyler is already chair of the scallop plan team and he's already a crab plan team member. The other two folks that— there was only two more folks that were on the scallop plan team were more specific to scallops, so we will invite them to probably— I think the plan right now is to invite them to attend when we cover scallops, which will be in about 3 years because it's only taken up every 3 years. But right now we don't have any. I think that ideally it'd be great if we found someone that had expertise in, you know, size-based assessments or invertebrate assessments that was related to both. That would be wonderful, but we haven't found that person yet.

So just for our SSC purposes, we're going to leave this crab plan team report item open till the end of all of our crab items in case we wouldn't need to go back and make any general crab comments, but we will pick off the individual species as we go in between. And also recognizing that I think we're going to have pretty extensive and excellent presentation on the survey coming up here, it's probably time to take a break before we dive into that because it's going to take a few minutes. So let's take our morning 15-minute break, come back at 10:15, and start on the survey.

Okay, if everybody could come back to the table, please.

All right, we're back. Back to you, Katie. Okay, I'm actually going to give it to Emily. Are you online, Emily? I am.

Can you hear me okay? Okay, great. Let me know if you, if you can control your slides, that's great. If you can't, let me know. I think you'll need to control them for me.

Okay, she said that you might be able to, so why don't you try, and if you can't, I will do it.

Oh, there you go.

Okay, looks like I can. Thanks.

Good morning, members of the SSC. My name is Emily Risner. I'm a research fisheries biologist with the Alaska Fisheries Science Center up in Kodiak, and I'll be providing a general overview of the EBS bottom trawl survey results for crab. And I recommend that if anybody wants more detail on any of these results or additional figures and data, I recommend looking at our technical memo that our group publishes.

All right. So this year we surveyed 349 stations in the eastern Bering Sea, and the survey spanned from June 2nd to August 4th. And this big figure here is illustrating total harvestable biomass biomass across the stocks that we survey. So this is legal size for red king— or for the king crab, so blue king crab and red king crab, industry preferred sizes for snow, tanner, and then I also have hybrid snow/tanner crab here. And then year is on the x-axis.

And in 2026, we saw that the total harvestable biomass across these crab stocks increased by 64% from 2025. And of this, in 2026, the harvestable biomass primarily was composed of Bristol Bay red king crab, Tanner crab, and hybrids.

I also wanted to note that there was an update to net spread values from 2024 to 2026.

And I won't go into a ton of detail, but there was a historical correction factor that was being applied since 2013 that in 2024, when we transitioned from an older generation of Marport sensors to a newer generation, this historical correction factor, what didn't need to be applied anymore. So it was removed in 2024 to 2026, which resulted in a 4% decrease or sorry, 4% increase in net spread values, and then a corresponding 4% decrease for biomass and abundance for these crab stocks. And the snow crab assessment was able to use this updated data, these updated data, and the state is also using these updated data for tax setting. And I believe Katie is going to talk a little bit more about where this has been able to be incorporated. But just for transparency, there was an update to these values.

So starting off with Bristol Bay red king crab, these are time series of abundance for all of the categories that we keep track of for red king crab, Bristol Bay red king crab. And we saw increasing trends in abundance and biomass across most of these size, sex, maturity categories. There was a slight decrease in mature females, but it's still an increasing trend in recent years. We also saw large increases in immature categories, but it's important to note that the— these increases were mainly caused by one high catch station, which encompassed approximately 65 to 68% of the immature catch.

Sorry, I'm just trying to find my next arrow here. And then these are size frequency distribution plots where the carapace length in millimeters is on the x-axis, and then each individual line is a different year with the previous, the earlier years in the bottom, the most recent year at the very top highlighted by that red line. Males on the left and females on the right. And in these plots, you can see for Bristol Bay red king crab, there was an increased frequency of around the 100mm size range for both males and females. But again, this was really accounted for in one high catch station, or the majority of this catch was in one high catch station.

So it's unclear whether this represents a true recruitment signal, or if it was just that one station that happened to be a really high catch.

I also wanted to highlight that there was no resampling for Bristol Bay red king crab in 2026. Resampling generally occurs to improve the size composition and abundance data for mature female red king crab, and in this takes into account how many females have completed the molt-mate cycle. And so we keep track of these as we're moving through Bristol Bay, serving Bristol Bay. We keep track of a threshold as to how many females have completed this molt-mate cycle. And we can—.

When we completed Bristol Bay, 56% of mature females had not completed this molt-mate cycle, which exceeds the 10% threshold that we've generally used used in previous years to consider resampling in Bristol Bay. But there are many different factors involved in making this decision that incorporated information from the Alaska Fishery Science Center side, AFNG biologists, and the stock assessment author. And ultimately, it was decided that no resampling in Bristol Bay was going to occur this year, as it would not materially affect survey or assessment results.

All right, for some reason my arrow doesn't like to show up. All right, for Northern District red king crab, this is again—. Can I interrupt with a question real quick before we move on? Yes. Go ahead, Sherry.

Hi Emily, I don't know actually if this is a question for you or for Katie, whether it's now or later, but it was actually, it was on your last slide with the resampling, and I just wanted to follow up and sort of see— I think that the last time, I don't know if this is a couple of years ago now, there was a comparison or an analysis that looked at whether or not to retoe, and I think that SSC said at that time that there weren't enough data points to make a determination, and I think that we asked for sort of for further evaluation. And I guess what I'm wondering is, it says here that resampling wouldn't materially affect the survey or assessment results. I guess I'm trying to understand sort of where things are now as far as, would they ever? Are we dropping this, or is there a new analysis to help us determine whether or not resampling will be Emily, I can field that initially.

Yeah, go ahead, Kayte. Sorry. Just from the CPT discussion part of this through the chair, we did discuss this at CPT, and where we landed was that the author and NIMSS and ADFND folks would work on kind of some sensitivity runs to the model results. As far as the years that we did have retoe and resample data and determine kind of some more comprehensive metrics as to when retoe— retowing may need to be done that were just as— that would probably be more complex than just a simple percent of females that didn't undergo molt-mate. And that, that was something that's high on our list with the idea that that we could potentially propose some expanded metrics for the April meeting that would also include, you know, that the sensitivities to that data from on the assessment side of things.

There was also quite a bit of discussion at CPT on the ability for the model to accommodate potentially delayed MOM timing. Currently is not something that we can do in GMAX, but it would be something we could add where you could potentially have an annual difference in timing for molting and growth to occur. So you could basically say, oh, in this year molting did not occur at the time of the survey, occurred after the survey or something like that, or before, instead of occurring before. The struggle with that for crab is that molting and growth coincide with recruitment because crab are recruiting when they're growing and molting. So there might be some convolutedness to that, but we did talk about there potentially being modeling ways to model our way into this versus the kind of costly, both in time and money, resampling.

So there were a couple different things that were discussed, and I think the plan is— and it was in 2022 that we did that, that analysis was done in our spring meeting— and I think our plan is to build off that and potentially have some expanded proposed ideas for at least going into the next summer survey in our April And I'll let Emily add in if she has anything to add to that. No, uh, thanks, Katie. That was a good overview.

And can you remind me, does that affect the model that you were— that we're using in this federal process, or does it affect only the state tax part? Yeah, through the chair, it affects the model we're using in this federal process, but in the past, the years where we did resample only the female data was used for those resampled toes. So it does not affect the male estimates coming out of the model. And since— I'm kind of getting a little into the weeds, but since it is a male and female model, but really the only place that males and females are connected is in recruitment, they have separate dynamics, it really doesn't affect the OFL output that you're getting from the model.

Thank you very much.

Okay, thanks. Please continue. All right, thank you.

Moving on to Northern District red king crab, this again is time series of abundance, and I apologize, it looks like the years were cut off of this figure on the bottom, but for reference, that blank is 2020 and then if that's a good reference as far as the time goes. But for Northern District red king crab, we saw this year mature female and male abundance at elevated levels in recent years, or compared to recent years, and it's important to note that the magnitude of abundance in the Northern District is much lower than Bristol Bay.

Moving on to Tanner crab, this slide is illustrating abundance of mature females in the top row and then industry preferred size males in the bottom row for Tanner crab west of 166 on the left, Tanner crab east of 166 on the right. West of 166, we saw a record number of industry preferred size males. And even though there was a decrease from 2025 to 2026, we saw a sustained high abundance of mature females west of 166. East of 166, we saw a slight increase in mature females and increase in industry preferred males, but For industry preferred males, again, this—. The majority of the catch for industry preferred males east of 166 was at one station in Bristol Bay.

So again, that's an important caveat to note, whether it represents a true population signal based on the spatial, spatial restriction of the catch.

And then these I think I see a question.

Yeah, Emily, sorry, I was just curious for the west side for preferred males, could you give us an idea of the— how many high stations there were there? There was only one in the east, but how many in the west? Yeah, through the chair, I can't give an exact number of how many high catch stations there were, and I think my next my next slide will have a spatial distribution of Tanner crab, but you'll be able to see that it was much more evenly spread out across the Bering Sea, or the Eastern Bering Sea, as opposed to the east where you can see there's one high catch station this year. And I, yeah, I believe it's my next slide that will illustrate that. Yeah.

Oops.

Oh man, okay, trying to get back.

For Tanner crab immature male, immature females, and small males west of 166, we saw large declines in these juvenile sizes after record highs. And so this is illustrating that some of these crab are moving into the larger size classes so again, we saw a record number of industry preferred size males, so just kind of movement throughout these size classes. East of 166, a slight decrease in immature females and an increase in small males, but relative to the rest of the time series, juvenile abundances remain low east of 166.

And these are—. This is for mature females. The next two slides will be industry-preferred males. But these are just the distribution maps of our catch interpolated over the eastern Bering Sea. And for mature females, distribution hotspots remain to the east and southeast of the Pribilof Islands.

And this has kind of remained true in the last 3 years.

These are abundance-weighted time series, uh, for latitude and longitude, and then this big panel is just those combined into a map. And for mature females, the distribution in 2026 remained near the time series average, and maybe a slight shift west compared to 2025, but remains near the time series average.

So this is the map for industry preferred males for Tanner crab. As you can see, as I mentioned earlier, there's this one high catch station for industry preferred males east of 166, but then for males west of 166, there's, uh, there was a couple of high catch stations, um, around the Pribilofs and then to the northeast of the Pribilofs. And also comparing to the previous years, there's really these developing hotspots, you know, around the Pribes, northeast of the Pribes, and then that one high catch station in Bristol Bay for, uh, indigene males east of 166.

And then this is again the abundance-weighted time series of latitude and longitude for indistinct males. The distribution continues to move northward for these, this size class. And in 2026, we actually saw the more northernmost centers of distribution that we've, we've seen in the time series since 1989, which is highlighted by this this red, red point here.

All right, moving on to snow crab. We saw in 2026 the highest abundance and biomass of mature female snow crab that we've seen since 1989. Correspondingly, we saw a large decline in immature females, which could signify that these immature females have moved into those mature size classes. Uh, for industry preferred and larger males, um, the time series remains, uh, near, uh, a low point, and we, we saw a 28% decline in 2026 of industry preferred males, um, compared to 2025.

Again, distribution maps for snow crab mature females. We saw multiple areas of increased density in 2026 compared to 2025, especially to the northwest, north— in the northwest area of the grid, as well as to the north— the southwest of the Pribbs.

And then, yeah, correspondingly, we saw that mature female distribution shifted south in 2026, which seems to be a continuing trend, at least from 2025. And then also remains a little bit to the west—. Or the east of the time series average in 2026.

Industry preferred males distribution continues to be widely distributed across the shelf. And at first glance, there doesn't seem to be any marked change from 2025 in terms of distribution.

And this is further illustrated by these abundance-weighted time series where the distribution for industry preferred males remains near the time series averages.

And again, these are size frequency distributions, this time for snow crab. In 2026, which I illustrated in the previous couple of slides, we saw a very high frequency of mature females that was preceded by a very high frequency of immature females in 2024 and then moving into 2025. Um, in 2025 and 2026, we saw more— sorry, in 2026, we saw more females at larger size classes than we saw at 2020, uh, than we saw in 2025 and 2024. So this is illustrating these crab like moving into these larger size classes. Um, it's also important to note that in both males and females, uh, we didn't see much recruitment into these smaller size classes.

And then finally, for males, we still haven't been seeing males reaching the same large size classes that we saw in the 1980s and 1990s. And this is further illustrated by these plots. So The, the left plot is illustrating the proportion of snow crab males that are maturing at industry preferred sizes, and I believe this may have been presented last year, but in 2026, 96.5% of males that matured were smaller than industry preferred size, and this is slightly lower than last year, but it's still very low compared to the time series average. We have a question here. Go ahead, Martin.

Um, yeah, thanks. Um, Emily, I think last year we got a plot similar to the one that you're showing with snow crab, but it also included a panel for Tanner crab west and Tanner crab east. And one thing I think I noted was that the proportion— I mean, then they were all showing somewhat of a similar decline, but it seemed like in this year, both the Tanner crab east and west showed a huge spike in the proportion of of crab that were molting to the preferred size, and it was as high, I think, as 40% for one of those two stocks. And is there sort of something we can learn from this? I mean, it seems like there was a big switch that occurred for tanners, but not for snow crab.

Yeah, through the chair, thank you for the question. You're right, there for Tanner crab, at least for Tanner crab west of 166, the proportion of males that were maturing, that matured at industry preferred size this year was the highest we've ever seen in the time series. It was high for east, or Tanner crab east of 166, but it wasn't the highest in the time series compared to west of 166.

There's been, you know, evidence for snow crab in the Canadian literature and from the eastern Bering Sea that at least snow crab seem to—. Male snow crab respond to the number of large males in the system, and they mature, you know, at larger sizes if there are more large males in the system to compete for mates, etc. And so it seems like there may be some type of feedback loop occurring where as the number, the abundance of large male, large male snow crab in the system, it continues to be at low levels, this may be influencing the proportion of those males that are maturing at those really large size classes.

For tanner crab, I'm not aware of as much evidence that would suggest something similar, but the majority of the literature I'm familiar with is for the snow crab mating system.

So it would seem like that for Tanner crab, there would have been sort of a, maybe a pulse of crab that were sort of prime, like large crab that were big enough to molt into that industry preferred size that maybe weren't present. We don't see that pulse right now for snow crab. Is that kind of the way to understand it? It seems like it's like a really strong flag that we should probably try to under— you know, figure out what's going on. And maybe I should, you know, just save this question for the— when we get to the stock assessments, because it might be more related to the stock assessment than, you know, just straight interpretation of survey results.

But I'm just wondering if you had any thoughts about that.

Yeah, thanks for the question. Through the chair, I do think it's important to note that we, yeah, like you said, we haven't seen those kind of pulses in previous years. And maybe I'll go back to the size frequency distribution. You know, in previous years we saw these big recruitment pulses that that just haven't really been perpetuating into these larger size classes. And it's not, it doesn't seem to be the same story for Tanner crab where we do see some of these pulses like moving through the system.

So there seems to be some bottleneck occurring where these crab are not growing and maturing to these larger, the largest size classes that are being selected for by the fishery. But yeah, again, maybe more discussion on this in the stock assessment slides.

All right, I'll continue moving. For hybrid crabs, so hybrid snow and Tanner crab—. Let's do one more question here before we move on. Go ahead, Martin, and then we'll move to hybrids. Yeah, sorry, I was just— the other sort of thing I wanted to follow up on was the, in particular for snow crab, was the clutch fullness, and that might be an ecosystem indicator, but my understanding was that, you know, even though we had that sort of record number of females, that the clutch fullness indicator was still quite high, and I also remember there was some discussion last year about trying to do some research to verify that the— those females bearing full clutches were in fact— whether those eggs were fertile or not.

And I was just wondering whether I first, you know, confirmed that clutch fullness still remained high, and then And also, what's the status of that research?

Thanks for the question. Through the chair, I don't know if Erin Fiduwa is online. She's the author of the snow crab ESP.

And from—. And actually, yeah, Erin, correct me if I'm wrong, but my understanding is that you switched to CLUTCH, the portion of clutches that were empty, or as a maybe a better metric instead of clutch fullness. And maybe I'll let Erin answer that if she's online. But then going on to the second part, we have been, at least in the Kodiak Lab, we have been discussing some female fertility experiments not only with snow crab but also with hybrids to see how fecund those females are with those full clutches. But Erin, I don't know if you're online and wish to answer more about the clutch fullness indicator.

Yeah, I'm online. If you guys can hear me, I'm happy to speak on that.

Yeah, please go ahead, Erin. Yeah, to the Chair, thanks for the question, Mark. We actually did have a pretty extensive discussion about your question on fecundity at the CPT meeting during the ESP. And I think the main takeaways that I presented to CREB plan team is that most of the evidence for females that we see this, this sort of loss of kleptozygia on fertilized eggs seems to be an artifact of laboratory mating systems. So based on the literature that I reviewed, a lot of the evidence for that is only supported by crab that are, that are mated in the laboratory and limited to mating trials, whereas when we bring crab back from the Bering Sea and we hold them in experiments, we've never seen indications of loss of clutches due to unfertilized clutches.

So we— the minutes sort of reflect this, that we had a pretty extensive discussion about this, and our sort of takeaway from both reviewing the past literature as well as Crabbe brought back to the Kodiak Lab is that we really don't see evidence in the wild for a large proportion of the female population that has full clutches that are unfertilized, if that helps answer the question. And then just in response to your first question, Martin, the clutch fullness is an indicator in the ESP, and despite, as you had said, despite low abundances of large males and a record number of mature females, we did see the matured, the majority of those mature female snow crab with full clutches. You know, there was a lot of discussion also noting that until we're able to run genetics on those clutches, it's unknown if those mature females mated with snow crab or if they mated with Tanner crab. Hopefully that helps.

Okay, thanks for fielding a few questions there. We'll go back to the survey presentation.

So hybrid snow and Tanner crab, last year we saw a record number of hybrids in the system across the size, sex, maturity categories. Or size-sex categories that we monitor. This year, we saw declines across all of these categories except for industry preferred males. And despite these declines, it's important to note that there's still many hybrids in the system. And large males, I mean, large males and in particular are still at time series highs.

And this is a plot illustrating the relative abundance of Tanner crab, snow crab, and hybrid males at the industry preferred size for snow crab. And in 2026, this is the first time in the time series that hybrid, the relative abundance of hybrid males at industry preferred size exceeded the abundance, the relative abundance of snow crab industry preferred males.

And these are the size frequency plots for hybrids between 2020 2025 and 2026, a lot of the hybrids that we saw molted into larger juvenile and mature size classes, and we saw some modest new recruitment into smaller size classes in 2026. And it's for males in particular, I've highlighted this area with the red box, and in 2026 we saw considerable biomass of males over 120 millimeters carapace width. And so these are really reaching into the Tanner crab industry preferred size range.

And these are distribution plots for 4-inch male hybrids, so 101 millimeters hybrids on the left. The 5-inch, the industry preferred size for male tanner crab, so 5 inches in the middle, industry preferred size for male snow crab on the right. And you can see in 2026, hybrids illustrated the largest overlap with the industry preferred size male tanner crab and slightly with the 4-inch male snow crab as well, but mostly with Tanner crab males.

And that is all I have for the survey slides. I guess I'll hand it over to Katie.

We have a question from, from Curry.

Thank you very much, Emily. I just had a quick question on hybrid crab, and I've never seen a snow crab and a hybrid next to each other, but sort of looking at the the survey time series, have the— are they difficult to tell apart and have the protocols for assigning them to snow versus hybrid, both in terms of the survey data and the catch, changed a lot over time?

Thank you for the question through the chair.

They—. We at the NOAA lab have spent a lot of time training in establishing proper protocols for identifying hybrids in the field. And it's not a stark black or white, you know, this is a hybrid. There's a range of characteristics that, or, you know, from a snow to a tanner, there's a range of morphological characteristics in between that, that can make it more of like a opilio or snow crab type hybrid, a tanner crab type hybrid. At least out on the bottom trawl survey, we characterize a hybrid if it possesses at least 3 intermediate characteristics between a snow and a Tanner crab.

And so that has been a protocol, I think, for quite some time now, and that's what we've been using to identify hybrids in the field. So there's no— there's no—. There hasn't been any change in protocol in the last, the previous year, or recent previous years, to now, it's been a pretty established set of rules we follow to identify hybrids in the field. But that being said, sometimes there is some difficulty in establishing hybrids in the field, particularly if there's, if they're more snow-leaning versus versus Tanner-Crowd leaning. And then, yeah, I—.

Does that answer your question? Yeah, thank you. I'm just sort of thinking in reference to the time series from the late '80s, '87 that you were showing. It seems like based on what you said that the protocols have evolved over time, but we should interpret that time series of hybrids as being consistent with the current characterization process. That is to say that these recent sort of unprecedented increase in hybrids were probably not there in the past but not being categorized as hybrids.

Yeah, I, I would say that's a fair assessment.

Question from Sherry.

Hi, Emily. I'm not sure if this is answerable, but I was looking— same thing for the time series length compositions. Yeah. And, you know, the other two periods of time, you know, were— if I can read them correct— is 2010, you know, a little bit after 2010 to 2015, and then back before 1990. Is there any idea of why hybrids come and go, I guess, and what that's related to?

Thanks for the question through the chair. I, I mean, there's some question as to, you know, the amount of spatial overlap between snow and Tanner crab and the resulting hybrid population that we see And I'd have to look back in the time series, but there— yeah, so I think the spatial component is an important thing to consider.

There's been recent research that has been led by Erin Fidowa that has shown that the amount of hybrids in the system also respond to kind of a competitive release mechanism from snow crab. And so that could also be a factor that is, I guess, resulting in the previous increases that we see in the time series. But the recent research has illustrated that the declines in the snow crab population specifically related to the 2018-2019 snow crab collapse are really seem to be driven by yeah, the snow crab collapse and the recent spike in hybrids that we saw last year and then this year. So yeah, spatial overlap could be playing into the previous spikes we saw, but then we have a little more insight into the recent increase in hybrids over the last 5 years due to this recent research.

Thank you. I'd just like to— through the chair, I'd just like to add to that too. In our May CPT meeting this— in this last year, we did provide pretty comprehensive review of the protocols that we both use at ADFNG for CAHPS data. And in the survey, we— the plan team saw presentations on both of that. We also saw presentations on some initial research that, like, she— that Emily referred to, Erin's work, and some other work to look at.

You know, why these hybrids might be occurring in higher rates. That's— there's quite a few presentations that are on our e-agenda from our May meeting, in addition to our summary and our minutes. We didn't rehash those at this meeting, but there's pretty extensive— if you're more interested in hybrids, I would go back to that e-agenda and look at those presentations.

All right, we're on the right slide, so we'll go from here. Thanks, Erin. I mean, not Erin, Emily. Sorry. I appreciate her willingness to present those slides to you today.

And then I wanted to briefly touch on a couple recommendations, comments related to the survey report that the CPT had. One was, as Emily mentioned, there were these data corrections due to net spread values for the 2024 to '26 survey data points. We—. Those came in pretty close to when our plan team occurred about a week before, so we did not incorporate them in assessments except for snow crab. So those will be brought forward in our April-May timing for the other stocks.

We did briefly talk about it, I think, under Tanner crab, as to the differences there being pretty small, and probably once they fed through the model as data inputs would have a kind of not noticeable effect on our overall OFL, and so we didn't consider them. One of the things we, we brought up during our conversation was that we could consider this in our ABC buffer conversations, but we determined that the influence was likely pretty small, and we didn't really consider them in that conversation for Bristol Bay red king crab or Tanner crab. For snow crab, we do have the corrected data or the— in the current tier 4 fallback REMA smoother, so that's already there. In addition, I wanted to bring up some of what we already discussed on hybrids. I imagine that this may come up in the snow crab discussion, as it did at planting.

We had some discussion during the survey report and some discussion during snow crab just because of the, the way that hybrids are currently landed is that like 98% of them are landed as snow crab, so that's So that's why it comes up during that discussion too. So this is also a reminder, in May CPT we did cover quite extensive—I think we had a whole half-day discussion on hybrids, and the CPT had recommended, and I think the SSC's comments—I didn't list them on the slide—were in agreement with that, but also that it should be tracked and monitored and might require more review if hybrids continue to be high, but just that we didn't recommend them being included in either assessment but we recommended monitoring them in this survey tech memo and asking that they be presented here, which is what we did see. In addition, and this is in our snow crab section so we can chat about it more, but the CPT did break a recommendation that research on hybrids, specifically, you know, understanding more about life history, distribution, movements, genetics, identification, remains a very high priority for us, especially during these high hybrid times. We also noted that in addition to research avenues, it'd be useful to have more information on potential policy and regulatory pathways that allow for future harvest and management of hybrids. And the reason we brought this up is we, we didn't want the research— the policy decisions, you know, typically wait on the research, but we didn't want there to be such a prolonged delay.

Like, if we have research that's ongoing and starting now, we didn't want the potential policy policy and regulatory pathways to have to wait for that research to start to determine what we might need to do. If we were able to identify hybrids as a separate crop or figure out a separate stock or figure out a way to manage them or harvest them more directly, we didn't want there to be a, you know, 3 to 5 year delay in the process of policy. So it made sense for us to recommend that these kind of occur at the same time so that when research was available it be inserted directly into, into policy frameworks if there was one. And so the reason that came up is, a little bit of context, right now, like I said, hybrids officially in legal terms are harvested as snow crab, and without, as, as Kari mentioned, the difficulty in ID falls into that. So right now there is some struggle, and they're like, how well can we ID them to have a separate fishery?

But regardless, this. We could not— right now there's only two stocks that are recognized in the FMP, and that is snow crab and tender crab. Hybrids are not recognized in the FMP, so doing a separate assessment or anything related to that would be outside of the scope of what is dictated in the FMP. So I'll stop and see if there's questions. Question from Jason.

Yeah, so there's the federal side, which is covered. I'm curious, did the CPT have a discussion about the state regulatory side and if there's issues associated with that. Through the chair, Jason, yes, that will— I have a slide in there on snow crab a little bit further in the presentation, but in general right now, the way that hybrids can be accounted for is the state has the ability in the tax setting process to allow for essentially a higher harvest of snow crab as long as it falls under the ABC in the tax allocation that would account for hybrid fishing. Currently, I think the struggle for that right now is that the only legal way the state can do that is by setting a higher snow crab tax. And when we set a higher snow crab tax, we have no way of ensuring that the, that entire tax doesn't just be taken out of snow crab population, because there's no way for us at the state to say that you have to harvest a certain number of hybrids, if that makes sense.

Oh yeah, maybe just— I'm sure you said this, but I'm just going to restate it to make sure I'm right. So hybrids are part of the snow crab definition essentially for state stock? Okay, currently yes, in regulation, uh, kind of— see, these crab that's landed has to be landed as either a snow crab and tanner crab, and because of the legal definition of, I think, what a tanner crab is, most of them get classified as snow crab.

So I have a follow-up question. I'm just reading the slide in front of us here, which says that they were— CPT recommends that hybrids are not included in the total catch. So if they're not included in the total catch, why do they count toward the ABC?

Currently, they're not included in the total catch, but if they were landed as snow crab, they can be included in retained catch. So total catch is our observer— so the way total catch is calculated is based on observer pots, and the observers can distinguish a hybrid crab from a snow crab or, or Tanner crab. So when we estimate total catch, we do it for pure snow crab or Tanner crab. At the processors, the processors have to account for the crab that are retained as either snow or Tanner. There is no no place on a fish ticket for you to put hybrid crab.

So they're the catch that comes in as those crab that were in the directed fishery, um, will have to be either snow or tanner. So those that are actually like the retained catch portion.

Okay, sorry, my question is purely scientific and bean counting. Do they or do they not fall into the landed catch that's used in the stock assessment model?

Through the chair, and yeah, yes, so the— yes, they do in the retained catch portion that comes into this, the stock assessment model, because there is no way to separate them accurately. Okay, thanks.

Chris, I think you just asked the same question I was trying to make sure to get squared away, and I think that's— hybrids are included in the retained catch. Is that right, Katie? Just, of course, a little bit more. Just, I would just want to make sure we're all clear that that's the case. So on a year like this, just if catch was just proportional, we should— there should be a higher number of hybrids in the catch if fishermen aren't targeting explicitly just snow crab.

Is that true? Through the chair, ideally yes, but that also requires, you know, where we're getting hybrid information most accurately is from observer pots, so I think it also determines, you know, the observer pots, how well that they are spaced out with where there may be hybrid abundances being caught at the same time as snow crab. The dockside sampling that occurs is, is not quite as extensive when it comes to hybrids and, and snow crab, just due to the nature of offloadings, is what I've been told. So ideally, yes, but I think some of that depends on what portions are observed well of the spatial distribution distribution of catch of snow crab, if that makes sense. Yeah.

Follow up, Ian, if I can? Yeah, go ahead. I was just again thinking about that. Is there then a way to, in essence, estimate the percentage of hybrids in the catch based on observer data? It could be rough, but it would be potentially better than not having any indication.

Is that true? Through the— it's your— Chris? Yeah, Tyler tried to— Tyler Jackson and Kodiak tried to estimate total for hybrids and actually ended up with a negative value, which means that we're seeing more hybrids in the retain catch than we were seeing in the observer catch. So I think that comes back to the, the disconnect in, like, spatial observer pots versus potential dockside. And so it is, in theory, it should be possible, but I think there are some complications to it with hybrid identification being kind of not as clear.

Question from Chris Anderson.

Okay, um, so just stepping back a little bit, I'm trying to understand what is the— what are the conservation concerns posed by, um, the presence of a large number of hybrids? Are they in an ecosystem sense threatening to either the Tanner crab or snow crab populations, or if there were a large stock of hybrid crabs, would we estimate them and manage them for MSY?

Through the chair, that is a great question, and I think it's something that we don't fully understand. It's hard to know if if hybrids are— if there's any evidence that they may be competing for habitat and food usage from either Tanner or snow. As you saw with Emily's kind of spatial, they tend— at least the large males overlap more with Tanner crab large males than they do with snow crab large males. The other thing is it's hard to know if potentially they could be some sort of ecological evolutionary advantage, potentially to help help with the snow crab population being low? Like maybe hybrids are one way that the snow crab population is staying around in the sense that like we have all these female snow crab, but there's not that many male snow crab mating there.

You know, are they, is that potentially perpetuating the snow crab population? Is like, I think that mentioned in Emily's conversation is like potentially, you know, we have these ways to classify hybrids, but there may be some hybridization in the snow crab population and innately also. So I think it's hard for us to know if they are like ecologically bad or good for the other two specific stocks. There's been a lot of kind of discussion about that within industry at CPT, but we do not have a good idea of the potential ecological negative or positive for this stock. I think the conservation concerns, right, currently come into play because of a legal definition of hybrids being lumped in with snow crab, that potentially any sort of increase in hybrid harvest that we could potentially encourage wouldn't preclude higher harvest of snow crab right now, because an increase in snow crab TAC to allow for hybrid harvest is, is just an increase increase in snow crab tag, there's no way to ensure that those— that increase is hybrid harvest and not pure snow crab harvest.

So that, that's the main conservation concern that I think the CPT tried to get across in our snow crab conversation, which we can come back to under snow crab too.

Can I follow up on that? Yeah, go ahead, and then we'll go to questions online. Okay, um, so I think one of the things I'm trying to understand here is the extent to which that is an administrative and regulatory challenge versus a practical challenge with trying to meet our obligations under Optimum Yield.

Can you repeat that? One second, sorry. Yeah.

So I'm definitely hearing that the fact that hybrids end up practically classified as snow crab prevents us currently from sort of harvesting the total crab, total Tanner hybrid snow crab population, group, um, uh, um, at potentially maximum level. And what we're concerned about there is that if we set a high TAC intending people to take a lot of hybrids, they could then go hit all the pure snow crabs. Um, and I guess my question is, is Is that a practical concern, or is it an artifact of regulation that's written in a particular way? Uh, through the chair, um, I think it's a little bit of both. I think because hybrids aren't a recognized species in the FMP, it is kind of related to policy in the sense that we have no way to designate a hybrid hybrid fishery or hybrid proportion of the TAC.

And so I think the other side of that is, as we've already talked about, hybrid identification is a little bit— it's pretty difficult. It requires a lot of different points on the crab that you're looking at, and the amount of time that the survey group can spend and do that to, like, say, oh, this is a hybrid crab versus not, is not the same amount of time that the folks on the the back of the deck or in the processing plant can spend on each crab. So a little bit, it is practical, but it also is practical in the sense that like there's not a quick and dirty way for us to say this is a hybrid versus a snow crab. And I think there needs to be some— what the CPT discussed is there, we need more research to potentially have a more consistent way of separating out hybrids in order to potentially have a hybrid-directed fishery but I think that we're also struggle with the way that the FMP is written is that if we developed a more consistent way to identify hybrids, we currently cannot have a directed hybrid fishery under the current designation. It doesn't mean that maybe the state might be able to do something under the TAC designation if we have a way to do hybrids, but ultimately it would still end up being a higher snow crab TAC because that's all we can legally legally set is a snow crab tag because of the rationalized fishery nature of it.

Okay, thanks for waiting on line. Next question is going to be Jen Burns.

Yeah, I want to follow up on something Chris asked, and I think you answered it, but I just want to be clear. We, when we were going through the ESR and the various indicators of ecosystem for the crabs. We talked a little bit about competition, um, and about the competition for space, and I'm trying to figure out how hybrids fit into that. If the hybrid population is larger now, what is the implication for those ecosystem indicators both from a, you know, kind of a space and a competition perspective. And if they're considered snow crab versus Tanner, I, I'm just puzzling over how the inability to designate these things as one thing or the other under regulation might also have an impact on how we perceive the ecosystem status for the stock.

Through the chair, great question. I think that some of the initial work that Erin Fidowa did in May that she presented kind of was showing that the— one of the potential reasons we saw this large increase in hybrids now was due to the fact that they weren't as young crab competing with snow crab because of the snow crab collapse. And so potentially you're right in the sense that there should be— there could be some competition through all all the life stages, and it's hard to know what the data we don't understand is the reproductive health viability of these hybrids. Are they as, you know, strong? If they were competing for snow crab, do snow crab always outcompete them, and that's why we didn't see them as much when snow crab population was higher?

You know, are they competing for mates in a, in a different way or similar mate? Are there— they are mating, but are their reproductive output— is it similar? Is it as fecund? Are they able to reproduce for multiple generations? These are all things that we still don't really have a great grasp on.

There is some research. There were— hybrid crab were collected on the survey, and I know that the Kodiak Lab has some couple projects that they're getting started on, and there's other desire to spin up some research related to this, but there's a lot of unknown with that. But I would assume that there would be competition at all the life stages if there were a number of hybrids out there to, to compete with, with potentially snow and/or Tanner crab. Although I will say that even though we're seeing this large amount of hybrids, we also are seeing a large amount of Tanner crab, as you saw in the survey presentation. The Tanner crab population is one of the largest we've seen in a long time.

But however, we're not seeing that with snow crabs. So potentially, could the large amount of hybrids out there somehow be— is it just a product of the snow crab collapse and there's no snow crab for them to compete with? It's hard to know. It's hard to know without having evidence of like a high amount of hybrids and also a high amount of snow crab to know if there's potential competition at an adult level. I don't know if I completely answered your question, but I tried.

I know, good. But then it raised another one, which is how then are the hybrid numbers dealt with? If you're talking about whether it's more— if it was more snow crab, you'd have more snow crab, and you knew they were snow crabs, then the snow crab abundance abundance would be increased in the models. If it was more Tanner, of the models of snow crab population and population forecasting, etc. If it was Tanner, the biomass would be Tanner in Tanner models.

Is the hybrid biomass included in any of the models of crab abundance and forecasting, or is it just sort of this unmodeled factor of the environment that kind of sneaks through the cracks because of its undefined under-regulatory status? Through the Chair, great question. That was something that we did chat— that we discussed pretty much in detail at our May meeting. We asked— we had the assessment authors for Sue and Tanner run a model sensitivities, including the hybrid abundance in the models, they were pretty— the models are pretty insensitive to those abundances because in most years they were pretty low, and we just had that one data point when we asked those authors to do that. In addition, most of them aren't classified as Tanner crab, so it really didn't affect much of the Tanner crab model.

The snow crab model also didn't really have an effect when you're looking at the whole time series. So right now, we— the CPT recommendation out of May was to not include them in either of those assessment models. That's something that we can revisit if that— if the hybrid abundance continues to be high. I think there's also, as we'll get to in snow crab, a little bit of kind of— because of the issues with the snow crab model right now, it's hard to include them in a Tier 3 assessment where we could, we could have them as part of that model, just because of the issues with that model. I will say that another thing that we brought up during our meeting— currently the survey group is collecting weights on hybrids to update the weight-length relationship of those and to determine if it's, you know, more similar to snow or tanner or what.

The other thing is, if you look back at the hybrid slides, the— all the males are classified by a size cutoff. We don't have a good way of assessing maturity using the keel height in hybrids. We do not have keel heights that are being collected on hybrids right now. The CPT did encourage that if it's possible in the survey to collect keel heights on hybrid crabs to understand maturity better. So I think some of our hesitation with lumping them into an assessment model is not really understanding their maturity dynamics, their reproductive dynamics, and just assuming that a hybrid crab, even though it's legally classified as a snow crab when it's landed, is equal to a snow crab in the reproductive population was something that the CPT felt very on, on study doing.

Thank you.

Next question from Chris Sidden. Yeah, thanks. Another accounting question, I think, Katie, and just curious how incidental catch and bycatch, basically all the discards, are accounted for and whether some of them are hybrid discards or are they all lumped in snow crab discards, and then if that's the case, are those getting counted to PSC limits and other, and how they're getting applied back to total catch Thanks. Through the chair, good question, Chris. I know in our, any of our observed crab fisheries, I would assume, and I can check with our folks in Kodiak, but I would assume that there would be some hybrid designation on discards if there were snow crab being caught in those other crab fisheries.

My assumption, and this is an assumption so I will have to check back for sure, is that in any of the groundfish fisheries I don't think there's any sort of protocol for hybrid designation in those, so those would probably just be classified as SNOW or Tanner.

And just a quick follow-up, and the— because there's such a spatial component, it seems, to hybrids, are the— is the expansion factor just a— is it— does it count, or does it deal with space, or is it just a broad brush estimate and scaling up from observer data. Through the chair, Chris, are you referring to the, like, bycatch from other non-directed, like, groundfish fisheries? Well, even the indirect, even the directed fishery, right, if that's, if they're not 100% covered, then they're getting scaled up to estimate total discards and then a discard mortality, but I assume it's all— then anyway, I'm just trying to think through how accurate and how well accounted those hybrids are in those discards, whether it's directed or not directed.

Through the Chair, Chris, I don't know the answer for the groundfish fisheries, but in our crab, like our directed crab, any of the total catch extrapolations and discards for crab fisheries are done by observer pots, and the observer pots in the crab fisheries will designate snow, tanner, and hybrids in those observer pots, and the total catch that's being extrapolated to put into the models will be the pure snow or tanner. The total catch does not include the hybrids. So hybrids wouldn't necessarily be incorporated in discard rates in the model. Thank you.

Jason?

Yeah, thanks, Katie, uh, for these— answering these questions. This is another accounting question. Um, so getting back to the discussion on retained hybrids, so there was an allowance by the the state to harvest hybrids. So I'm just wondering, I'm trying to reconcile what I heard was you weren't able to necessarily fully identify hybrids in the retained catch, but then it sounded like last year there was an attempt by the state to allow a small hybrid fishery, and I'm just wondering, I'm trying to bridge that in terms of how the counting was supposed to work on that. Through the chair, Jason.

Yeah, so we There is dockside sampling that occurs at the processing plant, and it is able to delineate out some hybrid for the portions of that that are sampled, and that's what we tried to base some of that. The way the state accounted for it is we said we're gonna— the process was the snow crab check was increased by 1 million pounds with the idea that we would encourage the fleet to harvest hybrids from areas of high harvest abundance that was observed in the survey, kind of encouraging them that the spatial— but we don't have any legal way of— like, that was just an encouraging of like, this is what we think. And then we— I do have a slide in here that shows the kind of estimated number of retained hybrids based on the dockside sampling that we have. I will say one of the struggles that we heard from the fleet and And those that do public testimony can kind of probably answer that a lot better than I can, but one of the things that we heard was that when some of the folks went to look for the hybrids in the areas that we said had high hybrids during the survey, that there weren't a lot of hybrids there at the time of the fishery. And so potentially there may be a spatial disconnect to where we're seeing hybrids in the survey timing, where hybrids may be in high proportions during the fishery.

And I do have a slide that kind of shows for those observer pots that we do see hybrid count, kind of where those hotspots were. I have a small figure, but there was a figure during the catch presentation on that. So we do have a way to account for it, but I would say that one of the disconnects that Tyler saw when he looked at the data was that, like, the total catch numbers that he was trying to estimate for hybrid hybrids were coming in like less than the retain catch. So there's a disconnect between what's being called a hybrid potentially and where the observer pots are occurring. Could be part of that.

It could be a spatial distribution versus retain catch. Could be, you know, just the— there's— we try to minimize the amount of the person that's designating it a hybrid user component, but there is some of with the way the hybrids are done as to how many characteristics you see and what you're calling a hybrid or not. Could be a little bit of time that they have to do it. The observers potentially might have a little bit more time or less time depending on what's going on than the dockside, depends on how quickly an offload is occurring and things like that. So— Okay.

Chris Anderson, go ahead.

I'm just following up on what is and is not known here. I'm thinking about what it would take to include hybrid biomass in one or the other stock models, right? We have a sense of how pure snow crab breed with each other. What's known about how effectively, like, hybrid females breed with male Tanner or snow crabs, and what's known about how hybrid males breed female Tanner or snow crabs?

Through the chair, I will say not a lot. Is the simple way to put that. We don't have a lot of research in the lab or otherwise on a lot of the hybrid reproductive dynamics. We also don't even have an idea if it's disproportionately maybe one way or the other when it comes when it comes to males and females. I think that from what I recall in the folks from the Kodiak Lab, they did collect some hybrids on the survey this summer.

I think there is some desire to potentially expand some of that study to some mating dynamics in the lab. I also think that kind of looking at those, those hybrids that they collected, that females that had clutches potentially looking at the number of, you know, those that are fertilized, that are, they potentially, so there's work that's kind of starting up, spinning up from that, but I would say right now there's just not a lot that we know about their reproductive dynamics, and kind of having such high numbers in that we're seeing last year and this year is kind of increased the priority of understanding that research specifically on reproductive and And also just survivability of those offspring and how, like, can they, the second generation reproduce just as well as the first? You know, these are all things that we don't know. And some of them are gonna take time and some of them can be done in some lab studies and some of them also would be pretty difficult depending on how long you can raise those crab to then mate. This is a second generation and things like that.

Kari. Yeah, just a quick thought experiment. So in the catch, we treat them as the same. They're all snow crab, right? That goes into informed removals from the model.

For the survey data, we separate them out. Is there any reason you would ever come up with a survey index that was snow hybrid agnostic and see what that would do to your estimates of overall population trends? I understand that kind of conservation risk that that implies, but Is there any way that would be helpful in better understanding the snow crab stock? Through the chair, Kerry, yes, so that is what we asked the assessment authors to do last May. So both, both snow and Tanner just assumed that all hybrids were either snow or Tanner to kind of give a high sensitivity to that.

We had them run the assessment models, and for Tanner crab, it really doesn't make much difference. For snow crab, it really didn't make much difference. But I think the problem is that we're looking at that entire time series. Series. And when you have these increases, now we have two— I mean, that was just with one year of an increase, right?

Um, and the other issue that kind of is confounded with snow crab is just the instability of that assessment model right now, um, makes it harder to know how much of that variability has just been eaten up by kind of just the innate, um, instability of that assessment model at the current time. Thank you.

Franz. Yeah, since we're still on hybrids, I'll ask my question now.

I was gonna hold it for later maybe, but I think it's really for Emily. Um, and I'm just wondering actually if we're, uh, tracking some of the overlap metrics now. I noticed that in the distributional maps, the Tanner-CRAP mature males were like further north than ever maybe, or than usual, and the snow crab females were much further south than usual, which would suggest much more overlap between at least Tanner males and snow crab females. And I mean, those, I know you've talked about that in the past. I was just wondering if those metrics are being tracked now.

Yeah, Katie, I can answer that or chime in. Sure, go for it. Yeah, thanks for the question, Franz.

Um, I— they're not being explicitly tracked, like it's not something that we report in our tech memo, but it definitely is something that we could track moving forward. Um, going back to the recent research by Erin Fidowa, those models did evaluate spatial overlap between mature female snow crab and large male tanner crab, and then vice versa, the mature female tanner crab and large male snow crab, as kind of causal mechanisms for the, at least the spike in hybrids that we saw last year. It did not incorporate this year's survey data. And interestingly, those spatial overlap metrics were not strong causal drivers of the spike in hybrids that we saw. Not saying that that isn't something that shouldn't be evaluated moving forward or to keep track of, because there has to be, you know, overlap between the two species in order for hybrids to occur.

But there also may be— like, that's, I guess, going back to to some of the kind of mating studies or other things that we're kind of thinking about is like, is there a chance that, you know, hybrids, the overlap between hybrids and female snow crab could continue to perpetuate a hybrid population? Like what's the viability of those mature females once they mate? So just like Katie said, there's a lot of unknowns But bottom line is that spatial overlap is something that we could and potentially should be tracking, at least in the, you know, our tech memo and something that we could report in the future. Thanks.

OK, it looks like we might have wrapped up our questions on the survey. I'm guessing that you're going to move to Bristol Bay Red next.

Before we do that, let's just do a little bit of housekeeping. Chris Sidden, if you're online, we missed you during associations this morning. Do you want to drop those in now? Sure, I can do that. And thanks, thanks.

I do have a few associations.

Elizabeth Sidden is is, I'm married to Elizabeth Siddon, so that's an association. And then Katie Paloff and Caitlin Stern are, I supervise those two, and then indirectly I supervise Tyler Jackson, who are all authors or co-authors on the CRAB assessments. And I think that's it.

Thanks, Chris. Now we're complete on that.

Um, yeah, I'm noting that we're getting sort of close to lunch, but there aren't that many slides for Bristol Bay red, so I'll let you go here, and we'll see how far we get. We may not finish Bristol Bay red before lunch.

Let's be positive.

All right, jumping into the first of our final assessments here, Bristol Bay red king crab. So I Left, we have an ESP for both Bristol Bay red king crab and snow crab. Just had summarized this into high-level points in one slide. I think a lot of this was already covered in kind of just the overall ESR information. But just in general, as you heard, it was cooler in Bristol Bay this year.

It was actually the 4th coldest in the 47th year time series in the summer. And so, We did talk about, already talked about, you know, the delayed molt cycle for females. It also meant that some of the things that we've been tracking in the ecosystem for Bristol Bay just fell out of being significant in the contextual, in the significant analysis that's done in the ESP. So all those indicators are now contextual this year. There's twofold with that.

Some of it is due to the changes in the ecosystem. That we saw, and the other is, as Emily already pointed out, kind of this blip in recruitment that we saw that's primarily due to one hotspot tow. And that a lot of these are correlated with the, that kind of time series of what we call recruitment into the model, which is right around that recruitment time series we're seeing coming in from the survey data. In general, this is another stock that we do have an ABSC, Alaska Marine Sea Crabber Skipper Survey, and so we did have that included as part of our socioeconomic and fishery-informed areas of the ESP. The captains did report, you know, a general increase in the perceived abundance of legal males out there.

The fishery CPU is pretty similar to the last open season, but no noticeable changes in fleet behavior in Yeah, so I think that's all I really had there, and I will come back to some of this in the risk table discussion at the end too. Overall, Bristol Bay is a Tier 3 stock assessment. Sorry, it has been in the GMAGS, or Generalized Modeling for Crustacean Stocks, platform since 2018. As Emily already discussed, there was an increase in both mature male biomass and mature female biomass in the survey. And as the slides to the right here kind of show in the yellow on the bottom, this increase in recruitment that was seen kind of due to a hotspot tow.

So whether or not that's an actual recruitment pulse coming through or an artifact of sampling is kind of yet to be determined. It was a little bit— didn't really see those crab in the previous year. We would expect to see them some in the survey. So kind of unsure whether or not that recruitment pulse will— we'll have to see next year if it continues through. As I already stated, the directed fishery was open with a similar CPE, crab per pot, to the previous year.

Estimated female biomass, or abundance actually, is a threshold for the State of Alaska harvest strategy opening, and we met that threshold this year, so there's no issues In general, we are seeing kind of a different time period of recruitment for the stock. We're not seeing the, the high recruitment pulses with the exception of this potential one coming through. And, you know, rebuilding— not rebuilding, sorry, don't want to use that word— so having the stock reach higher levels that we've seen in the past, there's not a lot of potential for that without having a strong recruitment pulse coming through. So Nope. Where I have— so this is just a brief slide about the fishery, and that you'll see the figure on the left here just shows the kind of weighted center of catch for the fishery in this past year for the directed catch.

On the right, you'll see that this is just the in general bycatch by the different fixed and trawl groundfish fleets. No increase in bycatch there, compared to the last few years, and the weighted center of catch for the, the fishery is, is pretty in the average area of where this catch occurs. This fishery is prosecuted pretty, pretty quickly, and the, the CPUE was pretty similar to where it's been last season, although it is still kind of lower than where it has been in the rationalized time period.

For this assessment, the author evaluated a couple things. First was bridging the model to a newer version of GMAX. Right after or around the May meeting, during Buck Stockhausen, the assessment author for Tanner crab, his work in moving Tanner crab to GMAX, he found a correction that needed to be done in the way the fishery mortality was being applied to size composition data where males and females were aggregated, and for Bristol Bay, this had specifically to do with the Tanner crab bycatch time series. And so the model was bridged to that version as a correction since that was considered an error in how that was being applied. The authors did provide tables and figures for that in the assessment and to the plan team.

In general, there was no large changes in the, the fit of the that model. There were some changes in the likelihood as would be expected due to the change in there, and all those changes to the likelihood had to do with the Tanner crab bycatch size composition and catch fit. The two models that were then evaluated for specification setting were the base model— these were all done in the updated version of GMAX— is the base model, which is 24.0C2. That is was updated with this new GMAX version and the new Year of Crab data. And then Model 26.0, which was one that you— we saw in May-June, this extends— has additional size bins for males and females in the model and kind of in response to previous comments that there was like a buildup of the plus group for both males and females in this model.

This is the survey data, females on the top, males on the bottom. You can see that these two models perform pretty similarly when estimating survey— fitting survey data. I will say that what I did want to point out is that neither for males or females, the model's not necessarily tracking the increase that we're seeing as much with as large a magnitude as the raw survey data. But some of that has to do with the variability that we're seeing in this last data point with the survey data.

In general, the two models perform pretty similarly, have similar estimates of mature male biomass and recruitment. One thing that Model 26.0 does is improves the size comp buildup in the plus group. The size composition distributions are provided in more detail in the SAFN and in the CPT presentation, but just pointing out here, as you can see in this one year that I pulled for the directed fishery, kind of the the base model has this buildup of crab in this plus group, and then the Model 26.0 extends those size bins, so it allows for a more kind of harmonious fit to the size composition data by not having the buildup of the plus group data. So with that, both the CPT and the author recommended moving forward with Model 26.0 as seen as an improvement, not large change, but an improvement. In the stock assessment process.

And, um, that results in an increased, um, well, both models would have resulted in an increase of the OFL from last year, uh, of, with a resulting OFL of 7.13 metric tons. Um, and the resulting ABC, assuming a 20% buffer, uh, the 20% buffer was this similar buffer that we've had for the last, um, 5 or so years for this stock. Way I'll run these slides for each of these stocks is I have buffer considerations on this slide just to kind of lay them out a little bit more clearly. These are above the buffer considerations here. I will say, as I show you the risk table on the next slide, are those that would be kind of included in the— if you recall from our May meeting, our new kind of risk table format of having a top row that would be those underlying kind of persistent long-term concerns that we have for our crab stocks versus those that would be on the bottom, which is the more traditional risk table setting of those things in each of the categories that are affecting this year's understanding of our crab stocks and buffer considerations.

So for this talk, for this talk specifically, there have been some ecosystem considerations that have been part of our conversation, Those are less so with the current ESP for this year due to the return to kind of cooler temperatures, but still something that we would consider being important for tracking for Bristol Bay because while it might be better this year, the amount of, you know, potentially corrosive bottom temperature or warming that's been enacted on this stock over previous years is compounded, right? It's not just one year that affects the crab stocks, it's the many years that they're developing and growing. Just also general, just non-stationarity and recruitment expectations. The model assumes a BMSY proxy that's based on recruitment from pretty much the entire time series versus how accurate that is for the recruitment expectations that we have or productivity expectations we have for the model. And then just some retrospective patterns in M&B that have been there.

They're not too severe, but they are present in the stock. So with that, I'll throw a run to the, the risk table. Apologies, I put all the risk tables in here. They're not the easiest to read, but I am co-chairing by myself, so I didn't redo these slides. Sorry, guys.

But in general, the top column has those persistent ongoing concerns that we have for, for the stock. There was some discussion at CPT where we landed with this, and we'll probably bring it up again in our April meeting to kind of reiterate the risk table format. There was a little bit of different authors doing the format slightly different, even though we— even with the guidance that we provided in May. But we kind of kept those persistent concerns to those first two categories of assessment-related considerations and population dynamics considerations, since our historic buffer really consider those two categories. And then, of course, the risk table on the— the typical or more traditional risk table considerations on the bottom here relate to all four considerations.

There was no increase in concern or risk from the typical, like, annual risk table. If anything, the return to maybe more typical or normal or cooler conditions in Bristol Bay is a positive positive, but just one year is— it's hard to know how much of a positive that would be. So we didn't consider reducing the buffer based on that. Um, and I think, yeah, that's all I had for Bristol Bay, so I can take questions.

Dana.

Yeah, thank you very much, Katie. Um, some of the text in the document talks about moving forward with a potential mail-only model. Um, Sherry was kind of starting this conversation, but maybe a little more about what the impact would be if we stopped doing RITOs, if you were in a mail-only model situation. And you mentioned it about the TAC considerations. Can you just talk a little more about that?

Through the chair, I think where that came up in Bristol Bay is potentially looking at a mail-only model. So one of the things that we're currently doing outside of the assessment is putting together a kind of a little bit more simplified, streamlined version of this model to do an management strategy evaluation. And when it comes to that and just computing power and time, the, the kind of idea of potentially doing a male-only model is something that we are considering, not necessarily for stock assessment setting. When it comes to resampling based on the molt mate timing of females, one of the discussions we did have at plan team was that we we have not replaced— the original male data is what goes in the model, even in those resample years. So in the model, essentially, when it comes to modeling and tracking the male population, having resample data doesn't affect the male population tracking.

It can come into play when it comes into the recruitment into the model and how much gets apportioned to males and females. That's where the female portion of the population comes in. Many of the female, like mortality and other things in the model, many of the female aspects are basically estimated as offsets from the male, so the males are estimated first. So essentially, even though we're modeling both males and females in many of these models, we really are like modeling them at the same time, but not necessarily— there's no stock-recruit relationship. There's no way that males and females are necessarily affecting each other.

Essentially directly in the models besides some potentially shared parameters or shared offsets. I don't know if that really answered your question, but maybe it did.

Sort of did. You didn't— so for the TAC considerations, if we stopped modeling that, would we be able to still do that process? Through the chair? Yes. Yes, Dina.

So right now, the The state tech considerations have a female threshold, but we're— we currently, the state tech, we have a kind of our older model in that we're looking to phase out that does model females to get at that threshold. We're also able to do that in GMAX. We'd probably still have to have some sort of way to, to estimate females, either that or potentially if we still wanted there to be— I mean, part of doing a management strategy evaluation is to determine how females should be part of this decision. I don't know if you guys recall, but for Tanner crab a few years ago, when Maddie did her master's, the way that females are incorporated in Tanner crab is by a dimmer in the harvest control rule instead of a hard shut-off. So those are all things that we want to look at when it comes to the state harvest strategy.

As to how females should best be incorporated. There may be ways for us to do that using survey data without it necessarily being modeled in a, you know, more complex framework such as GMACS. So there may also be ways for us to, you know, run concurrent models and just potentially depending on which one we're using for specifications too. I don't necessarily want to say that we should get rid of females in the modeling process overall, I think it's helpful to have a wider population model for a lot of these stocks that we're able to do that for. But I will say that when it comes to like complexities, one of the things we're recommending for snow crab is potentially to do a male-only model.

Just, it does reduce the amount of parameters, the amount of things that are confounded in the models. So when it comes to like maybe tracking down issues with models or convergence issues, it can be helpful. I think with Bristol Bay right now, it's pretty stable. I think the biggest thing that's like preventing us from a full MSE looking at the male and females together is just the time. Like, one run of that model takes about 30 minutes.

And so when you're talking about doing a management strategy evaluation, that's going to be a lot of time and computing power. So anything we can do to kind of simplify that so we can get a good idea of those different harvest strategies on the male portion, which is the part that we're harvesting, would be more helpful to us in the, in the long run. That was a long-winded answer, sorry. It's okay, but, uh, can I have one more follow-up? Um, your previous response on that one, um, segued me to my favorite topic.

Um, the, the recruitment ratio, sex ratio, is like 0.82 in this model, and I always feel like that one is one we don't have, like, the biology to back that up, and it feels like that's a parameter that could be masking a lot of other processes and just kind of soaking that up. Have you run any models with forced 50/50?

Through the chair, not recently, but that's something that we could look at doing.

Thanks. Brad. Thanks, Ian. Thank you for the presentation, Katie. Tons of work.

My questions are mostly just for clarification. So there's a summer in your Eastern Bering Sea trawl survey, we'll call it closure area metric, and it's presented in two places in the document, once as a percentage of total interpolated abundance, both sexes, and in other places it's presented as, I guess it's just in the report card, as a percentage of the mature males in closures. Can you clarify which is which? Through the chair, great question. Um, I want to phone a friend.

Is Erin on still? Yep, I'm here. Could you field that? Yeah, sure. Um, yeah, through the chair, thanks for the question, Brad.

So I can double-check that. Might be, um, maybe a confusion with last year's indicator. I actually revised the ESP indicator this year to include the full population. I understand past years it's only included mature males, but that has since been revised to include all Bristol Bay red king crab.

Okay, thanks. Follow-up, another question if I may.

I can ask this during, assuming that we have some public testimony from Alaska Bering Sea crabbers, but when it comes to the skipper survey, input. This information I think we've consistently found valuable, but I could not identify in the document anywhere information regarding the sampling frame. So just how many skippers were invited to participate, how many responded, so the response rate, whether responses represented the fleet, kind of whole fleet by vessel, quota, fishing area experience. So can you provide some insights there, or I can Or we can wait until we have public testimony. Through the chair, yeah, I don't have the specifics of that on top of my head right now, so I think that you potentially— Alaska Bering Sea Crabbers folks, if they— when they do public testimony, could specifically answer to that.

I will say that we, in addition to having this information in the ESP, we've had Corey give a presentation to us this last May, and we'll continue— we'll ask him to bring forward one in April. Roll with the results of that survey in more detail, and that's to allow the plan team to look at that and weigh in on that in a little bit of a less condensed timeframe than we do in our— in what gets kind of simplified in the ESP framework. But I think that they can probably answer those more specific questions, and if it's something that we maybe want to have more explicitly in the ESP, I think that would be a good recommendation for, for us in the future. Katie, I can add to, if it's okay. Go for it.

Oh, okay. Through the chair, Brad, that, that text is probably buried in the ESP. I could point to it, and that's a great point that I think it's important to emphasize numbers and how well that response rate represents the fleet. So I'm happy per SSC recommendation to make sure that that's better highlighted in the document, and I appreciate that recommendation.

Thank you. Just one more. So can you quickly characterize the CPT's discussion around the use of the rationalized period mean alongside the full historic time series?

Yes. Erin, can you, can you field that one?

Just to clarify, was that in reference to the Yes, do you want Brad to repeat it?

Erin, you still there? Yeah, I'm still here. Do you want him to repeat the question? Oh yeah, I just was confused about the reference to the rationalized period. Does that refer to— in reference to the socioeconomic indicators specifically in the ESP?

Yes. Yes. Yes, so we have had a bit of discussion, and I know the SSC has discussed this too. Right now, all of those time series averages from the socioeconomic indicators include the full time series rather than just the post-rationalization period, which we recognize often is is rather deceiving. So I think after this CPT meeting, there is a formal recommendation to only calculate those averages relative to the post-rationalization period.

Hopefully that answered your question, Brad. Yes, thank you.

We have more questions. Go ahead, Dana.

Um, yeah, so I was listening to your presentation at the plan team. And you made mention of the time when we asked you to start the model later in like 1985, but you said it was quashed. I was wondering if you remember why or if you're still interested in pursuing that.

Through the chair, Dana. Yeah, so I did do model, like right around when I took over this assessment, I did model runs with the model starting then. It's the, the CP, general CPT recommendation was that we should be using all the data that we have available, and there was not a— there was— that was not adopted. Um, it's fairly straightforward to do. If it wants to be brought up again, we can do that.

That's an easy thing I can check off a box, is what I'm saying. So was it something you were interested in pursuing? Um, for me it made sense because there's a lot of, uh, dynamics that are different in that, like, just first 10 years due to to the high mortality event and other things, so it just seemed more consistent. We're already only using '84 to recent time for estimates of BMSY. We're not including that early part-time series, so it would reduce the number of parameters and complexity of the model.

So yes, but there seems to be— there was some pushback at the CPT over that and just not utilizing all the data that we have kind of idea. I have one question on the risk table. Realizing that it's still evolving and this is— we're still in the trial period here, but could you just walk through the rationale for including weak to no stock relationship under population dynamics? I guess I'm not really following why that would be there rather than assessment considerations specifically. Through the chair, I meant to take that specific wording out.

Note, but I did not. I think that where we— consideration for like some of the non-stationarity of recruitment, the fact that the assessment currently, and it could be potentially I can move it into that one, the assessment and the way that we set specifications assumes that our estimate of BMSY is from a recruitment time period from 1984 to 1 minus the current year. And The recruitment signal that we're seeing from the stock, definitely, if you look at it over time, recommend— appears to be a difference in the recent time, like 15 or so years, where we're not seeing the same variability in recruitment, the same range of recruitment that we were seeing. And so that is encompassed in the model in the sense that we're, you know, as you follow size distributions up and your population is lower, it's there. Where we felt that it was maybe a little bit more of a population dynamics concern when it comes to reference points and how the reference points are being calculated.

So I think that's how it got jumped into there versus assessment-related concerns, because it's, it's, it's being tracked in their assessment because you track the population as it goes through by size. But whether the, the reference point determination of BMSY is appropriate for the potential, the productivity potential of the stock. And so there might be a better way to word that, that talks about the productivity potential instead of specifically recruitment. Does that make sense? It does.

If you could just fit that into 6 words, it'd be awesome. Do so. Okay.

Kiri.

I don't want to take much time on this, but I'm wondering if you can just help me with the structure. So is that top row the long-term concerns. And so even though there was no buffer change this year, the ones on the bottom are new concerns and they just weren't great enough to change the overall buffer? Through the chair, yes, Sherri. So all the ones on the bottom would be new concerns or concerns related to all those categories in this year's data that we had that was— that's not already in the long-term persistent concerns, but But all those levels were considered to be 1, which means that we didn't have any— well, I guess the level doesn't necessarily relate to the buffer, but none of those were large enough that we felt like that would be an increase or decrease in buffer considerations.

Okay, um, not seeing any sign up for public testimony. Nope, we have public testimony. So since we have public testimony, let's take a lunch break and come back fresh, and, um, and we'll restart there with— and if any— that way, if anybody changes their mind and wants to jump in on public testimony there, we can do that too.

So we'll be back at 5 after the hour. Whatever hour that is on Alaska time. 1 PM.

Okay, we'll come back to our meeting.

And we are done with our presentation and questions for Bristol Bay REDD. Now on to public testimony. We have one sign up, and first up is Corey Lesher. Welcome, Corey.

Thank you, Mr. Chair, and good afternoon, members of the SSC. I tried to get out of this testimony, but was requested to provide some comment context. During the discussion right before we broke for lunch, there was some, some questions that came up regarding the Alaska Bering Sea Crabber Skipper Survey. That data flows into the ESPs, where the ESPs are available.

So, Um, I, I don't know that it was in the, the ESP report, so, um, this is information that I provide to the crab plan team, and we're, we're trying to determine a schedule that's appropriate to provide, um, the skipper survey updates annually. Um, my— I provided a presentation of the CPT in May of this year, so May 2026. There's, um, slide 6 kind of an outline of participation in the skipper surveys, and because it was, it was, it was brought up, I'll just provide some information. So for 2025-26 season, this most recent crab season, excuse me, Bristol Bay red king crab had 35 vessels participate in the fishery. 29 Of those vessels completed a skipper survey.

For Bering Sea snow crab, 34 vessels participated in the fishery and 22 participated in our skipper survey. For Western Bering Tanner crab, there were 31 vessels that participated in the fishery. Out of those, 27 completed a skipper survey. Eastern Bering Tanner had 11 vessels participate in the fishery 10 of which completed the skipper survey. And I would note that Western Bering Tanner, Eastern Bering Tanner, we're considering that a pilot.

This was the first year that we were able to do skipper surveys for those fisheries, as well as Aleutian Island golden king crab. And 100% of those vessels participated with a caveat that there are multiple skippers that go on those boats. And so we, we chose to take a representation of, um, of the skippers and the vessels. There remain challenges to get participation from, from all of the, the fishermen. I think the biggest challenge is just contacting them at the end of the season.

A lot of these guys don't use email or, or don't pay attention to their phones. Um, I think we have— we generally have excellent participation. I would note that 22 of 34 vessels, and snow crab is a dip from our, our last, um, survey. And so we'll work on that on this upcoming year. But I'm happy to answer any further questions in regarding— in regards to the skipper survey, if that's helpful.

Great, thanks for your testimony, Mr. Lesher. Thanks.

We will roll now into our discussion, and beginning with the leads, first up is Dana.

I want to start by thanking Katie, who's the author and planning chair, for presenting the assessment. We also appreciate the ESP team and the risk table contributors for their thorough addressing of past SSC comments. Public testimony was just received from Corey Lesher, this year to clarify the deliverables from the skipper surveys in characterizing the sampling frame across the different fisheries. Excuse me. So following the fishery closures of '21 and '22, the stock continues a modest upward trend.

Fishery CPE from the skipper surveys were telling us that they see higher CPE than the previous year. The 2026 bottom trawl survey showed a cool thermal regime with summer bottom temperatures the 4th coldest in the survey time series. Due to this cold pool, many mature females had not completed their molt-mate cycle at the time of sampling in June, but no resampling was conducted. Even if the assessment transitions to a streamlined male-only model, continued monitoring female molt timing and clutch fullness may be important for the SPN risk table.

We also saw a very high increase in abundance of immature crabs, but most of this was from single survey stations.

So in terms of models, we had the base model from last year and a new model, 26, that expanded the male size classes from 20 to 23 bins. This expansion of length classes in Model 26 was an improvement. I think I've had too much caffeine.

The expansion of these length classes was an improvement which successfully resolved tail compression in the upper size classes and significantly improved likelihood fits to size compositions across all fleet fleets without deteriorating survey biomass fits. The jittering showed a strong numerical stability and convergence to the global minimum.

So we concur with grad plan team and the author in Model 26 or harvest specs. We are still above MSST, so the stock's not overfished but remains barely in Tier 3B.

The catch was below the OFL, therefore overfishing is not occurring. And we concur with the PRAB plan team recommendation to maintain a 20% buffer. This buffer appropriately accounts for unmodeled assessment certainty, particularly the persistent retrospective trend.

So recommendations for future assessments. The SSC agrees with the author that developing model-based substitutes for temperature-driven female molt delays is a research priority if future analyses show that modeling females is important for management and assessment results. The SSC recommends exploring environmental covariates such as cold pool on survey catchability or selectivity, or applying spatial-temporal standardizations like the SDM-TMB to accommodate those thermal delays.

We note that the stock assessment authors are working on a streamlined model for harvest strategy MSE The SSC requests that the author bring forward for January— the January workshop a male-only model configuration, so eliminating the female population arrays entirely. In addition, I think the recruitment sex ratio parameter acts as an artificial aliasing parameter that soaks up sex-specific survey noise. So I would request a model that explores the 50/50 fixed recruitment sex ratio. In addition, it was mentioned at the crab plan team about the benefits of a later start date to the model. The SSC recommends evaluating a candidate starting in 1985, following the stabilization of the fishery post-collapse, and that more closely aligns to the recruitment time series that's used for reference points.

That way we could get rid of that 1980 to '84 elevated natural mortality spike.

Finally, we support continued tracking of the Northern District red king crab survey data outside the traditional boundaries and continued development of the SDM-TMB spatial temporal model to evaluate connectivity. That's it. Thanks.

Okay, thanks, Dana. Next up is Brad. Thank you, Ian. Great summary, Dana. So I support Dana's, all of Dana's recommendations, including the use of models, 26.0 for the '26-'27 specifications.

And I'll limit my comments to the ESP. I feel like the excellent work by the contributors and that the ESP report card continues to provide useful ecosystem, spatial, fishery, and socioeconomic context for reviewing this assessment. Dan already noted, you know, this bottom temp this cycle was the 4th coldest in a 47-year time series. Interestingly, the, the female molt-mate cycle appears to be delayed, with fewer than 1% of females having completed molt-mating and with empty clutches. Distribution indicators generally remain consistent with continued occupancy of the core Bristol Bay habitat, and then near average spring pH index should be interpreted alongside the longer-term decline.

And fisheries indicators that we've been presented remain useful in terms of context for local availability, fleet behavior, and potential spatial aggregation, all things I think we should keep an eye on. The current Bayesian adaptive sampling analysis did not identify any of the ecosystem indicators as having adequate predictive support for, particularly for pre-recruit abundance. So wind stress and pH, which have in the past been interpreted this way, A did have the greatest relative support, but their model averaged effective intervals overlapped zero and overall had pretty poor fits. So the indicator suite really provides us contextual monitoring information, so still very useful for risk tables, research priorities, future assessment development, so forth. So I think our minutes should once again appreciate the ESP authors' continued development of report card, their clear presentation of current ecosystem spatial fishery and ecosystem, or sorry, socioeconomic information.

I think it continues to be useful companion to the assessment and the risk tables just because it organizes this evidence and identifies plausible mechanisms and emerging concerns. I think that's particularly important, especially as we see some potential indications of recruitment and/or have sort of tentative optimistic look down the line. Um, the crab plan team recommended evaluating a smaller male size class as a response variable for future indicator analyses and calculating fishery long-term means over the rationalized period while retaining the full pre- and post-rationalizations series for transparency. I think the SSC should concur with both those recommendations.

And a couple simple additional areas that I think we should recommend clarification. One is to reconcile the closure area indicator and annual incidental catch status across the ESB report card crab planting summary and presentation. And the analyst indicated that there was already work underway to kind of clean up some, some elements of the document to help us do this. For the planned transition from the Bayesian adaptive sampling to the dynamic structural equation modeling, I think the SSE requests are going to, you know, should align with what we asked for the BAS work to begin with, which is that the analyst identify decision or predictive question being asked, the response variables, the candidate indicators and lags, data revisions, diagnostics, and hind out-of-sample evaluation with the notion that even though we're shifting from sort of one logical framework to another, that retaining results as contextual unless a reproducible and biologically defensible predictive relationship is demonstrated. So we would carry on using the same viewpoint we have for adaptive— Bayesian adaptive sampling as we move forward to to a tool that allows us to try and look for alignment over time.

And finally, I think SSC should know that we appreciate the insights provided by Alaska Bering Sea Crabber skipper surveys, and as we heard in public testimony, really note the value of the sample frame information and request that the analysts work with Alaska Bering Sea Crab staff going forward to ensure that we have appropriate information to help us better interpret the input from the skippers.

Thanks, Brad. Other SSC comments on Bristol Bay REDD? Sherri?

Sure, I just have two comments. The first one is I was wondering whether, given that Katie had mentioned that the January modeling workshop schedule is already tight, I was wondering if it's possible to have the mail-only model just be a regular recommendation and then prioritize it as far as like how high the priority is to allow them to do the timing, um, or if there was a specific reason that you wanted it done this January. Yeah, I wasn't sure if it was appropriate for me to recommend for January or for just the next cycle. Um, I think the mail-only might have been happening in January anyway. No, okay, so just future recommendation then.

Yeah, cool. The other comment that I had, and it actually came up when I was watching the presentation, so you as authors may, or as leads may know this, when we were looking at the risk table, they've got the previous considerations that are pretty stable in the, in the top part, and then this year's in the second, and they were all Level 1s. I, I can't remember where we left this for development of risk tables, but I almost wonder whether there— if I'm wondering if there should be a second set of levels for the old, because essentially we have— they're all Level 1s and we got a 20% buffer. For another SOC, they may be all 1s this year, but they got a 75% buffer. And so I'm wondering how track between what is a level and what is a buffer.

And so I'm almost wondering whether it makes sense to other people on the SSC to have two sets of levels since they really wanted to have this distinct and have the first one be the historical issues, and it might be, um, level 2 for population dynamics, which leads to the base buffer of 20%. This year they're all Level 1s, therefore it's not changing from the 20% that was there last year. It's a— if we're going to have this sort of bifurcated table, it's— this is not going to be consistent with groundfish to have two sets of levels, but I just don't know another way to try to get to sort of a buffer from the risk table itself. So I'll just put that out there as a proposal suggestion for consideration by authors and the CPT, but I very much welcome other people's thoughts.

Martin? Yeah, I actually hadn't noticed that, Sherri, but it is a good question because, I mean, the buffers are, are a result of concerns, and so it seemed to me to almost imply that it shouldn't be a Level 1, it should be at least a Level 2 for ones that are flagged at that top level, because otherwise you would be using the maximum permissible ABC, which is this close to the OFL. And so, so I guess I would say Maybe we should send them back to rethink how they want to score the top level, the continuing concerns, without really— I don't know that you need a whole new system. It's just that they are flagged there because they are historically have been considered an issue.

Chris Anderson.

Responding to Sherri's question, I guess I had largely interpreted the risk tables as being buffer modifiers, and we'd sort of established based on how well assessment models fit and various other stock-specific long-term features what a baseline buffer is for that stock, and then the risk table was a way to formalize whether we were increasing or decreasing that buffer on an annual basis.

Rob, I have you next, and then Sherri. Actually, Chris just covered it. I don't remember when we had this conversation, but I remember the lengthy conversation, that, um, is exactly what Chris just summarized.

Then what if I retract this recommendation, and, um, when we get back around to the crab planting, we can make a generalized recommendation? Um, I guess Let me ask Chris, was this, um, never mind. So I'll retract that for now and do a bit of digging and see if I can, um, make sure that I'm not directly contradicting a decision that we, or a recommendation that we've previously made.

Rob, and I remember these buffers were set on the long-term concerns and, uh, issues with the model that wouldn't change on an annual basis. And it also had to do with how TAC is calculated and set, right, as far as including buffers rather than ABC versus TAC.

Um, I don't recall a discussion of TAC being included in as part of our discussion of those. I guess my recollection falls somewhere between the group so far in that I think we did want to be able to compare the top sections of the tables across species, which is what you can't do right now, 'cause there's no information on levels that would allow us to compare across species.

Um, there's only the description. And so it's maybe not terribly transparent how you get from those descriptions to the different buffers that are currently applied. Um, so I guess, I would pose the question, should we throw out this concept entirely, or should we just ask for a little more work on this? I don't recall that this is an entirely closed issue.

Sherri? Yeah, I definitely remember this is in process. I do remember the crab plan team is wanting to only compare last year to this year, and I remember the SSC is disagreeing with that. How that came forth in our minutes, that I don't remember, but I, I'm pretty sure we didn't land at being full wholeheartedly and sure, let's just look at one-year changes, but I can't remember our suggestion on that. I'm, I'm willing to do a little bit of digging in our minutes to see sort of what was last so that we don't contradict ourselves and then bring it up in in the CPT report, or we can just put it in there as something to consider, but that's— it's just pretty vague and doesn't give a whole lot of direction.

So my suggestion would just be to postpone, hold off on the rest of the conversation until later.

I don't know.

Okay, seeing no disagreement with that, I will conclude that we will hold the any further discussion of risk tables to the general plan team section and not just not list them specifically under Bristol Bay Red. So with that, just a brief summary, I won't try to cover all the points. We'll thank the author plan team, ESP authors, and others contributing for their continued development of all of these various products. We'll note the public testimony provided on the skipper survey. We will summarize briefly the salient results from the ESP this year, notably the cooler than normal temperatures, and also from the survey presentations, the recent— the lack of resampling despite a high proportion of molted crab.

We'll note the high abundance of immature crab, but that, that was primarily from a single survey station. We saw two models, the base model from last year and the new model with expanded length bins. We will concur with the crab plan team and author on Model 26.0 for harvest specifications and also concur with the 20% buffer. We will note that catch was below OFL, and so therefore, OFL, overfishing was not occurring. We will recommend some developments on applying covariates to environmental factors and/or standardization with geostatistical models to try to get at some of the model parameters such as selectivity.

We will have a few comments on the ESP, primarily noting that there are no quantitative indicators currently being reported from the ESP. So this is mainly a contextual monitoring piece for Bristol Bay red. We will have some recommendation to reconcile the closure area indicators across the various presentations and bring those in alignment. We'll have some comments on the transition from Bayesian sampling to DSEM. Suggesting that the authors identify the properties of the system as we shift from one to another and continue the basic thinking behind the approach, even though we're changing the quantitative methods.

We'll support the skipper survey going forward. And for, specifically for the Bristol Bay red king crab assessment model, we will support the development in, in during the next cycle of a male-only model, as well as exploration of a of a 50/50 sex ratio at recruitment and a candidate model that would start in 1985.

And there may be a few other minor additions that we can add in our text that were stated as well.

Okay, I think that wraps up Bristol Bay Red. Uh, we'll go back to Katie for the next which I think is Tanner. Back to you, Katie.

All right, uh, next up we have Tanner Crabbe final assessment. And if I get it to like me— the arrows were working for a second there. All right, Okay. Um, so the CPT heard a brief report— before I get into the assessment— on the Tanner-Crabbe CIE review that actually occurred this past June, and those reports are available posted to the CPT agenda. The reports were only made available to the author a few weeks before plan teams, so The author did present kind of the 5 terms of reference that the CAU review covered and some kind of just broad recommendations for that, but no work yet done on any of these.

The assessment author is working on, I would say, not quite all of them, but some of them that we'll see in future model development. So these are the 5 terms of references. That were presented to the CA reviewers. First was transitioning to GMACS. I would say that generally that was supported by the reviewers.

As you'll see in the assessment here, we're not quite ready for that, that the reviewers felt that it needed some work, and that's kind of where we landed with the cycle with CPT. Also, Buck has— the assessment author Buck Stockhausen has worked quite extensively the last at least 2 years or so on side-by-side selectivity analysis and how to use the BSFRF survey data in different ways. They did support that work thus far, had some questions on, you know, methods and implementation of data in the model. This is something that we'll revisit in our modeling workshop topics. The other thing, the bigger— I said of all 5 of these that the CPT was interested in is is the kind of federal Tier 3 harvest reference points and how appropriate they are for specifically for kind of Citi's crab.

And I just grabbed a couple quotes there as far as like the reference points kind of being that this is quotes from the reviewers, kind of being inappropriate for the stock because of the lack of a stock recruit and other like productivity relationship. There were some suggestions, there was no, clear, like, you should definitely do it this way. There were some suggestions from the reviewers on what could be done to potentially understand productivity better and potentially looking at simulation-based approaches to get reference points, like what's worked in the past and, and how the stock has responded to it. And then potentially if females should be included or are important and potentially included in limit reference points. I will say that the broader CPT recommendation for this particular term of reference is that this is something that CPT would like to revisit, but not in a standalone just for Tanner crab.

We think it would be appropriate to try to review our harvest control and specifically reference points for all our crab stocks, but that's as far as we recommended that we should do that, but it's as far as we got thus far on that one. The other thing that the terms of reference for was a two-area model, just because the state does manage Channer Crop East and West. This was considered to be not immediately necessary, potential future work. So kind of something that would be interesting, but is it really needed? Some of the comments there also focused on how appropriate that spatial management was.

Some work that has been, that has been looked at previously, but maybe could be continue to be looked at in the future. And then of course the hybrid situation, and they did find that kind of similar to what we've concluded at CPT, that most likely the hybrid consideration needs to be made in the snow crab assessment and not in the Tanner crab assessment, just due to the kind of current legal definitions of, you know, Tanner crab being those that are, have red eyes and M-shaped mouth and all other Carnassidis crab are lumped into snow crab. So most likely the hybrids may— would potentially play a bigger role in the snow crab population. So, but did highlight that there's a lot more research that's needed, as the plan team did also. So I just wanted to bring this to your attention that there was a CA review and here are some of the terms of references and things that were discussed.

I imagine that you'll see as we continue in model development for our January modeling workshop and for April, which of these things will get hopefully addressed in the assessment model or through the process there. But I wanted you all to be aware of that. All right, let's see. So I'll jump into kind of a Tanner crab overview for this, um, of both the fishery and, and just general survey and what we'll see here with the assessment. Of course, as we already stated, ADFNG manages and you saw with Emily's presentation, manages the Tanner crab population east and west of 166.

So the— both fisheries were open this past season. You'll see in that first line there, the TAC for both the western fisheries is quite a bit larger than the eastern, and most of the TAC was pretty much met for both of those fisheries. Total fishing mortality was much less than the OFL, therefore overfishing did not occur occur. And the stock is quite a bit larger than MSST, so the stock is definitely not overfished. If anything, the stock is reaching pretty historic high levels.

If you look at that top graph that just shows the trawl survey results in biomass for males, females, and then the IPM is industry preferred males, you'll see the, the large jump in males this last year to pretty much the— well, since the largest Tanner crab population of males on record there. So we are continued to see, and as you see in the bottom, what's highlighted in that green circle is kind of a good progression of this recent cohort moving through the population. Not much small recruitment coming up to this year to continue forward, but this is at least the strong cohort progression is in. It's encouraging to see that, and see it continue through. All right.

Oh, that's not gonna work.

There we go. So what we saw from the author as far as assessment models was— this is a SOC that Buck has spent a lot of time working to transition to GMAX, and in the process, a lot of model development and programming development in GMAX. Gmax. This progression is still ongoing. We had hoped to be at a point where we could accept a Gmax model at this meeting.

We found that he was able to make the population dynamics match. Some of the issues that we had in May with the OFL being slightly different, he was able to reprogram and estimate that to be the same. There are some just general differences in the Bismoke model and Gmax due to the modeling frameworks, which you'll kind of see in the figure to the right, just the buildup of the population in different components. However, some of the issues begin with the diagnostic testing of the GMAX model. There are some issues with getting some of the, the retrospectives and jittering to run and to kind of confirm convergence.

Some of that has to do with the fact that there were quite a few changes being made to the modeling framework and the way that that that needed to be carried forward in order for the jittering and retrospectives to run consistently. There were still some inconsistencies there. So that is all— Buck already emailed me at some point in time between CPT and this meeting that a couple of those he already figured out. So I think that those are all on a good trend to be hopefully determined, and we should see either some progress at January modeling or definitely some progress in the April proposed models. For next year to fully adopt the GMAX.

But we were encouraged by the fact that the population dynamics, the models when you run one function call are doing the same population dynamics. It's a little bit in the estimation and convergence that we need to confirm that GMAX is doing the similar or comparable results to the bespoke model. So due to all that, the author recommended, and the CPT did concur, using the base model which we used in last year's assessment, which is this model 22.03D5.

And just overall, this, this model has, has fit the— doesn't have any— here to have any convergence issues. It has fit the, the model as well. It's tracking these recent size comps, it's— there's still some concern that it's kind of optimistic with the number of crab that are out there versus reality, but that's been consistently a kind of part of this model as we move through. The author did provide the fallback RIMA smoother. We didn't really discuss that much for Tanner crab because we endorsed the Tier 3 bespoke model, but it is in the document if you are interested.

With the bespoke model, the author did put together retrospectives both with the model itself and then historical comparisons. That's using the accepted model in each year, which you'll see to the right. One of the things we did spend some time at CPT, which is why I wanted to bring this up, was that there were some differences in the peel estimate, the scale there, as we peeled back, and that got to some discussion over how retrospective analysis analyses were done. Currently, Buck is starting the retrospectives from the parameters that are being estimated in the current year's model, and we did recommend kind of doing that both ways. So starting it from the current year's model, but then starting from a PEEL of 10 just to see if he was getting to a similar place.

He was finding that some of these differences had to do with estimation of M in the model. But overall, the CPT, like, feels that this model model is stable and is converging, just some different trends in the retrospective pattern there.

So with that, we recommended the shaded columns here— or rows, sorry, not columns— of the model 22.03D5 for the— with updated data. You see that the it is an increase in OFL from the previous year. Let's see, I already said that. We also recommended a 20% buffer, which is the same buffer that we've had for this stock for the past few years, and I will— the next slide will be the risk table here that we'll get to. But just those buffer considerations are longstanding concerns as far as kind of the model performance, abundance of large crabs, still tend to be overestimated, although less so compared to previous years, and that was an improvement that we saw last year.

Continued concern over just kind of similar concerns that we have for snow crab, but whether mature male biomass as defined here is a good index of reproductive potential, concern over the reference points, which was reiterated by the CIE review, and then the positive is last year and this year we are seeing this recruitment pulse moving into larger size classes. So that is a positive thing, but not so much that we would reduce the buffer. And then the resulting risk table here, this is— I was— when you guys were just talking about risk tables just a few minutes ago, Buck actually did do it where he had levels in both for both rows. So I was like, there is inconsistencies there, and I, if I was in the back like wanting to say that, so now I will say it. We do have some inconsistencies.

We did not address consistency in risk tables at this meeting just due to capacity of the, of the meeting. We do have a topic that we'll put on our April meeting where we'll kind of reiterate what we want to see, and that's where maybe that's where we can look at what your recommendations were, the SSE recommendations were, and weigh in on that. So Buck did provide kind of level levels at the top for the top row as far as whether it's normal concerns or increased concerns, and then the bottom was the current, and he just— those— he just has no change there. So I don't know if the recommendation is to do levels for both rows or not, but this is another variant as to how to do it, I guess, is where we're at. So I do think that for the most part it was helpful for us to have these long-term persistent concerns, like just with risk tables in general on the top row.

I think it was helpful for us to separate those from specific things that are occurring in the ecosystem or to the stock or to the fishery, like any of those categories for this year, right? So I do think that this was helpful format. I think there's still some, some things we need to work out with that. So yeah, go ahead, Ian. Yeah, I have a question on the second category there, it says the abundance of Tanner and snow crab hybrids was the largest seen in the survey time series, and that's in the long-term category.

And I'm just wondering, that to me, that seems like that would go in the current category.

Do you have any thoughts on that? Through the cherry in— yeah, I think that would probably be— he has it listed again Um, in the current— so maybe that's— see, that's a little bit of what we didn't spend a lot of time on the details here. We talked a little bit about things, but I would agree that that would be a recent— maybe he put it up there because it was last year that was the highest versus this year. So maybe that would— that's something we need to clarify, is like, um, long-term persistent would be not just not this year, but it would be things that would be ongoing versus— so the hybrid increase last year and this year would be, I think, down below in the current. So maybe that we just need to classify current as like this year, but also potentially, I don't know, this— the last few years or something like that, something that hasn't been there long term.

It's how you interpret long term versus current, I guess, is the other question that we could get into. We didn't spend a lot of time looking at each of these and criticizing them or bringing them forward. I think that that's something that when we firm up what we want to do with risk tables in April, that might be what we do, kind of look at the different examples and determine a better template of what we want to see in each of those and what goes in each of those and what current means. Does current mean this year? Does current mean the last 3 years or 3 to 5 years?

And what is long-term persistence? Persistent mean, you know, are those things that have been ongoing for more than 5 years, you know, something like that. I feel like we need some general guidance on that, which we didn't really get into when we put this together in May. Part of the reason was we didn't, you know, in May we spent so much time kind of coming up with what's the best step forward, we didn't have a lot of examples to work with. So now we have these examples for at least these, the 3 stocks, and we have the ability to move forward from that.

I think try to make make them a little bit more consistent between the stocks.

So with that, I think that's all I had for Tanner crab, but I can take questions. I really simplified this quite a bit, but I can take questions here. Curry.

Yeah, thank you. I just had a couple of questions about the assessment specifically, and one of the things I noted is that this assessment uses sort of interesting spin-up approach in the the pre-1973 period to kind of see the initial, uh, numbers at age. And that's different than the way we might approach it in other assessments where you're sort of estimating the initial numbers at age at sort of the starting point. Um, and the reason I ask is that both in sort of some of the comparisons of addition of new data, and in particular the comparisons between GMACS versions and the, the sort of status quo model, that period often differs quite a bit. Obviously recent dynamics, very stable, very similar.

I'm just wondering kind of if you could walk me through the history of why it's done that way, if you perceive any potential identifiability challenges that might propagate through as we start thinking about why these GMAX versions aren't performing in the way we might expect.

Through the chair, that was a lot. I will say in simple— in simplicity, I don't recall the historical why Tanner-Crep spins up differently. I think a lot of it has to do with as these assessment models and different authors were in charge of them, different approaches were taken. I know that we have asked Buck in the recent future, potentially before he started into the GMACS realm, to look at different ways to start that population. So that was something that he has done recently.

We did not adopt any of those changes, but I don't know if that was convoluted with our prioritization of GMAX too, if that makes sense. I know that it is something that is on our radar as being something that might be a little bit more easier for the author to explore in GMAX. So I think maybe it might have been something we tabled until we have a more stable GMAX model. As far as some of the potential issues with GMAX, I really do think that the GMAX model is in good shape. I think the struggle was— I'm getting a little bit into the weeds, but as a lot of the changes that were made in the— to accommodate Tanner crab weren't necessarily carried over into the diagnostic components.

And so when diagnostics was trying to be run, Buck was running into issues with, like, not all the parameterizations being carried over in a way that, like, the jittering and retrospectives were being done correctly. So I think they're all achievable things that can be adjusted and fixed. It's just it was going to take more time than we had before this meeting. I will say too that only because this relates to your comment earlier, Buck did let me know that it is on his work plan to work on an RT&B version of GMAX and that he's hoping to have kind of a very basic framework in there to maybe present in January modeling, but he did want to kind of point out a be great for, for us in the process to highlight the need for that, especially now that ADMB is not going to be supported, that to have that in a framework that is more used, is more commonly used by other assessment platforms, would be great for us to make sure that's a high priority for us. And it's helpful for it to be done more in-house.

The way GMAX was developed was a lot of of postdocs and a lot of work, which is great, but it's led to several different people writing different parts of that code, which leads to some inconsistency when you try to update or change it of like which parts you need to update and change. So, yeah, so that's a high priority for us, but I am optimistic about GMAX for TannerCrab and I think Buck is also. It just wasn't quite ready for us to adopt yet. At this meeting.

Okay, I don't see any other questions on Tanner. Hey, Ian, if I may. Oh, sorry, I knew I was missing somebody somewhere. Chris, go ahead. Thanks, Ian.

No worries. Um, hey, Katie, I've Going back to the comments about the CIE review for Tanner, but it has bigger implications, I was just curious, can you provide some context in, on the comment about you do not having the issue of the spawner recruit and not being useful for reference points and how that relates to harvest control rules since we have a harvest control rule topic coming coming up in the next day or two and just trying to get a feel for how big of a concern and how high of a priority that is from your standpoint, because it, you know, incorporates a number of stocks for crab. Thanks.

Through the Chair, Chris. So there's— that's kind of a multifaceted answer. I would say initially, I think it's It's pretty— I think it's important for all of our stocks. I think a lot of the conversations we've been having in the last few years for snow crab, for tanner crab, relate to how we're determining our reference points and appropriate removals for these stocks. And there's always been some underlying inconsistencies with the federal harvest control rules and the state harvest strategies that kind of rely on, fall back on some of these assumptions that we're making in the state, in the harvest control rules that we're maybe not making in the, in the state harvest strategies.

So I would say, definitely say it's a high priority item. I would say as far as the harvest control world work that's ongoing, it's hard because that, that's running on a pretty tight timeline. And my interpretation of that, and other people can speak to more specifics, I don't really know, is that the crab are kind of on their own timeline, so there aren't really right now included in a lot of that work just because we, we need more work than what, what they're doing with a lot of the groundfish work there. So I don't— I think crab was kind of considered to be important but maybe not on the same timeline as the groundfish stuff for the harvest control work, and I have— I'm not really up to date on all that from a crab perspective. Does that answer your questions?

Yeah, I think it does. Thanks, Katie. And I think, and mostly this was a reminder for me and maybe some other folks that we circle back to thinking about prioritization of incorporating crab and we think about harvest control rules over the next couple of days. So thank you.

Curry. Yeah, thanks. There was quite a bit of discussion at the CPT about sort of assumptions surrounding mortality after the molt to maturity, how to treat that. So my understanding is at present there's a separate natural mortality that's assumed for crab after they molt to maturity, but that that's constant independent of how many years they've been in that pool of mature crab. I'm wondering, later on there was some discussion about kind of the potential for the model to overestimate some of the largest crab in looking at the Fitzwilliam comps, and I'm wondering if you the plan team discussed or what your thoughts are on whether or not those two are related.

It seems like if we're underestimating mortality for that, you could end up with the model estimating more crab than are present or observed. Through the chair, Kerry. Yeah, I think that was precisely why we were talking about it. Just idea, this idea that as, you know, with both kind of species, when the crab molt to maturity, they stop growing, which means they're not, you know, they're not molting, they're not producing a new shell. What does that mean for, like, we estimate a mature crab natural mortality in both these models that's separate from immature, but it's just one natural mortality.

Does that really encompass the realistic natural mortality that they may occur? Is it compounded, you know, compounded the more years that they are from molting to maturity? You know, we can't age crabs, so that's part of our difficulty is how many years are they out there? How would we separate that in the model. How do you know a crab that's out there that's molted to maturity has molted to maturity 2 years ago, 3 years ago, 4 years ago?

And so we did have some kind of discussions on like, is there a way to look at cohort progression with like the cohorts that are moving through and potentially try to model natural mortality? But I think those are all like good research ideas potentially. It's just hard to know if they're really achievable in the, in the framework that we have, without having specific ages or ways to track that. But, but that is something that I think came up because of that kind of idea that like the model thinks there should be maybe more crab out there than there are, and what else could be incurring if it's not fishing pressure. One of the things that came up in the CIU review that I didn't really highlight in the slide was just kind of the overreaching when they talked about reference points, idea that like this stock has had pretty massive well, Tanner specifically, because that's what we're talking about, massive fluctuations.

And, you know, probably not all due to the fishing pressure since the fishing pressure has been pretty minimal compared to what we think the harvest control rules say that we can take out of the stock. So what else is like leading, what else is driving productivity, right? And that's one of the big things that came out of that is like understanding productivity of these stocks would be great. Like, how do we go about that? How do we understand that?

And, and one of the things is that, you know, how, how long do we expect them to live after they molt to maturity? And there was some discussion on that, um, in the, in the, at the meeting.

Martin, sorry, do you have a follow-up? Curry, go ahead. Just a very brief follow-up. So I, I'm wondering if— so I was sort of thinking through the mechanics of that, and when I was listening to the plan team, right? So you have, within the model, you have a cohort that, that sort of molts to maturity, and then in theory, you could track their age after molt to maturity and apply different natural mortalities to those, even though we admittedly don't know the age of those crab, but that's sort of theoretically how it would work in the context of the assessment?

Through the chair, yeah, it's also hard because when crab are molt, so crab growth can molt and move multiple size bins. So it's— there'd be a lot of assumptions that you would have to make and potential probabilities of like how many of those crab that have molted maturity in that size bin have been there before versus how many. I mean, we do have some shell condition information, which is, you know, is it a newly molted crab versus a crab that's been around before? But once they get to shell 5, which is the ones that didn't molt this year, like, there's not that much difference. You know, they're just old crab that have been around for at least a year, and then it's hard to differentiate those from very old crab, I guess, is what I'm saying.

Thank you, that's very helpful.

Now Martin. Yeah, I feel like we've been on the sort of transition to GMACS, it's almost like an event horizon, like we're just, we've been there, and I'm sure when I was I was co-chair of the crab plan team. We were almost there, so it's been a while. So I'm just wondering, being a little facetious, but is there anything we could sort of planning or structuring the next steps in a way that sort of gets us out of this place? Through the chair, Martin, I don't think so.

I think we're very close. Close to it. There was a lot of accommodations that Buck had to go back and program into GMAX to get things to kind of match in a way that we wanted him to do for bridging, either our suggestions or the SSE suggestions. It is very close to being ready. I think, like I said, Buck's already made some progress in CPT, and I think that— don't recall what he said he might present in January, but they're either there will be an update then or definitely in April.

And I think we're very close to adopting GMAX. So it does seem like it's been ongoing for a while, but it hasn't quite been that long. But there have been— if you look at the progress and GMAX versions, Buck has put a lot of work into matching and working on updating GMAX to make sure that things are— we can do a very thorough bridging analysis. So a little bit of that is, I think originally when we started down this road, we said, oh, we'll just— we can bridge a more simplified version, and then at some point in time we came back and said, oh no, just kidding. We want you to do the whole version, you know, the current bespoke model as a bridging.

So I think there's a little bit of that back and forth with— between us. When I say us, I mean like CPT-SSC and the assessment author on on what we wanted for a bridging analysis. And I think right now he's pretty close to having something that's very comparable, if not almost identical, except for a couple spin-up population things and things like that. But I think we are close. I think we were really hopeful after May, but the diagnostics kind of threw a wrench in things where we were like, well, let's make sure we have all the diagnostics working and make sure we don't mostly because of the same issues that, you know, convergence issues we're having with SnowCrab.

We, we're pretty sure that the bespoke model converges well, and Jax Buck's work is really thorough on that. I'm pretty confident that the GMAX will too, GMAX model will too. It's just we weren't able to perform those and see those, so we weren't ready to move to that.

Thank you, SSC members and Mr. Chairman. Appreciate the opportunity to come and share a little bit and give a few comments on some crab stuff. So For the record, I'm Scott Goodman. I'm the Executive Director for Bering Sea Fisheries Research Foundation. I know you guys at this time of the season hear a lot about crab, and you've been moving in and out of a number of different topical things today, this morning.

So I signed up under Tanner crab, but the 5 things that I'm going to talk about sort of overlap with a few different things. I'm going to mention snow crab points, some higher hybrid points, a couple of workshop items, a very brief note about our recent field work, which was a snow crab project, and then just some importance about the survey modernization strategy that has kind of straddled over a number of things, and it's going to end up being pretty critical for crab. So if I miss any of those, my intent is to kind of drill in a little bit of time on this one figure that you're looking at. And if you haven't looked at our letter that we submitted to, please do so. It kind of covers the snow crab and hybrid aspects here.

So just to begin with, the CPT folks and all of the assessment authors, we wanted to just acknowledge all they're doing. It's a lot. Nothing seems to be very simple or straightforward for crab these days. I think the industry's perspective is we're very hopeful for a good year, which is going to be helpful across a number of things economically. So we do see the highlight that's, I think, maybe with season announcements today even.

So quickly on snow crab, I don't want to drill here too much, but it's been a long, challenging time to track what's going on and to see stability. We definitely appreciate working with Dr. Zawalski, and we understand Dr. Adams' coming on board. We're looking forward to more as we go there. It's just been a bit of a confusing level of frustration to try to see what the real reality is each season here for the last few years for snow crab. For hybrids, I want to touch base on this figure.

One of my jobs is to try and just kind of lay things out as clear as possible. This was one of those efforts, and it just takes a quick commercial male biomass view for snow crab western bear dye, and hybrids. And last year we saw this big pulse of hybrids growing. It was a little bit of an eye popper when you looked at abundance, but when you look at biomass, it's even more revealing, and especially for this year. So currently there's like 52.3 million pounds of commercial biomass.

This is 4-inch-plus size hybrid males. Directly from the survey results. You're contrasting that to another really big growing component with the western Bairdi stock at 92 million pounds. So those are the really good positive signals for this year, that, that's the big strong signs of hope for what's going on. The unfortunate side is that you saw, you can see on this figure, the green bar for 2026 is the snow crab biomass, and we had all hoped to see it go from, you know, 26 to 40 to 50-something and then go up.

It did not go up. So we didn't see a positive signal there. And I think everybody that we are working with and talking with really acknowledges that the risk component here is how do you get some of those hybrids? How do you get some of them without imposing more stress on the largest of the snow crab animals? So I just wanted to bring this to the SSC's attention, maybe for any questions and follow-up that are worthwhile.

Workshops. We understand that at times it's just about bringing the details forward so people can kind of see what the issues are. There's lots of multiple layers here with regards to how to improve the outlook for for accessing hybrids, and we would suggest kind of an expansion of what you guys did here on the survey discussion earlier today, um, taking a real concerted effort through potentially a workshop to talk about hybrids, um, given the limited resources at times. And I think in this current period, we would be willing to help with that for sure. I wanted to mention quickly and briefly here, as I see my time is Worth mentioning that our first large-scale snow crab project just finished up within the last couple of weeks.

It was our OPS 1 project with 2 crabbers and 1 Nephrops trawl sampling boat on the Vestra Allen. We're in the process of reviewing that information. I would say that it's too early to say, hey, here's what we saw and it either corroborates or does not corroborate the NOAA survey, but we're in the process of doing that at and looking at that and will be capable of sharing. I can answer any questions about that if somebody wants to hear a few quick key things. In my remaining seconds, I would say that we have some really big strong concerns about the NOAA survey modernization strategy.

If crab models were a little stronger, I think we'd feel better, but the NOAA survey is the spine of data that feeds the season considerations here, And with big changes on the horizon there, that's, that's what we, we are focusing a lot of our effort and concern as we, as we go forward. I can take questions. Thanks.

Curry.

Yeah, thanks, Scott. I've got two questions. The first one is a question that arose during the plan team discussions, or I guess was raised by the CAE reviewers about about the sort of assumptions about selectivity of the nephrology trial. And I was wondering if you could speak to that point. There were some questions about whether or not that needed to be validated with some additional research.

Maybe I'll stop there and then I'll ask my second question. Yes, great question. Thank you. Through the chair, Dr. Curry— or sorry, Dr. Penningham.

Yes, that's a great question. I did not get to be super attentive to the CIE review, but I did follow up with Dr. Stockhausen a little bit. And I think the question that came up was, you know, what is that baseline for the nephrops trawl sampling? Does it get everything in front of the net? Our assumption, our working assumption has been to just say yes.

We have video footage that documents, so I would say qualitatively that we're pretty confident with that. At the same time, I do, and I would say that we can always follow up with more of that, especially some of the modernization NOAA survey gear gets completed, we can do more of that. And I think it came up as a point of further study, so we would be supportive of that for sure.

Thank you. I appreciate the reminder about the paired video and nephro— nephrobs trawl to sort of validate that. The second question does deal with survey modernization. So obviously there's been a long history of side-by-side. Comparisons with the existing bearing, these gears, that gear is changing.

There's ongoing efforts within the center to compare new and old gear that kicked off this year. How are you planning to, to build that into the comparisons that you're doing from a BSFRF perspective? Thank you for the question. Through the chair again, yes. So we had hoped to do more of the testing comparative toes this year.

Our OPS1 project had just really just a handful of tows that we did in the same area, but not the same time. So this work that we're talking about is best done when it's a true side-by-side, same time, same area. So you minimize the spatial and temporal variability, but at times we've done it as an indexing where we haven't been in the same time or in, in some cases, cases the same place. We're working on that again. Uh, the big concern I think right now is resources, and as next year's plans are laid out, it's my understanding here that next year, 2027, for a survey year is a Northern Bering Sea coverage year, which would preclude any of the directed further expansive— expanding of the testing for the modernized gear.

But nonetheless, I think we're interested to keep the next couple of years, maybe even more than that, directly in our priorities here as how we can do side-by-side work or really anything to support the modernization strategy, both for the fishing gear and for the places that the methods will change to. Thank you. Yep.

Rob. Yeah, thanks, Scott. I have a couple questions also. One is related to that survey and what, what is the footprint of the survey that includes the pots and the nephrotrol? Thanks for the question.

Very good question. Through the chair, the methods that we have developed and refined for the crab-specific trawl survey, which we call the BSFRL, NEPHROPS trawl are quite different than they are for the NOAA survey. So NOAA survey results, I think I put a short summary of this in my CPT presentation for a refresher, but the NOAA survey is a 30-minute duration tow at 3 knots with the 8312. And so they're, you know, basically towing for half an hour at the center of a 400-square nautical mile box. The NEPHROPS Strawl is 5 minutes of winches-off time and it goes 2 knots.

And the, the real difference is that the front end of that gear is, um, structured with a particular chain that precludes the fishing line, so it kind of actually embeds or digs in a little bit to the substrate depending on how soft it is. But the area swept comparison is about somewhere between 1:6 1/8 of the NOAA survey. So in terms of sampling across Apache distribution, there's definitely those considerations as well, trying to do as many tows as you can rather, in contrast to just lining up to do a single side-by-side with a 30-minute tow versus a 5-minute tow.

Okay, thank you. And then the other question was related to the hybrids. As far as their distribution and where the fishery vessels would likely encounter them during the period of the fishery? Is there much known about that? Like, would they more likely be in Tanner crab associated habitat or snow crab associated habitat?

What do we know about that?

Um, through the chair, great question too, the distribution of hybrids. I think this year we were kind of looking for an all-you-can-eat Bairdi with a side of hybrids. Approach, um, just because there's so many bear die and there appears to be so many hybrids. To give you some good answer, um, it's mixed. And I think there's probably places where there could be some isolation or some coordinated effort that would help.

I think I noted in our letter to you that the approach that the state took last year made sense, but it was challenging in that, you know, there was an additive piece. I think it's shown on screen here with the 1 million plus the 8.3. But if there's no coordinated effort to kind of direct the effort at hybrids, or if hybrids are mixed with either western barred eye or snow crab, then it imposes challenges on how to do it. I also think that the spatial review that was shown earlier today is notable in that there's more overlap in 2020 from the 2026 survey this year than there was last year. And then of course there's always a temporal change from the June, July, August survey to when the fishery might find them and occur on top of them.

So it's a little complicated.

I have one question if you still have energy for more. Yes, please. Um, the question is really, we, we've been having some discussion about delineation of hybrids in the survey criteria and the observer criteria. And I'm just curious, when the harvesters are on the water, do they know what they're catching when they're catching it? And is it obvious when you're in a mix of hybrids and snows versus just hybrids?

It— I mean, are we sort of making something here that isn't, isn't really happening on the water? Is this really hard to tell on the water as well? Yeah, that's a great question, um, Mr. Chairman. Um, I could give you a long-winded answer, but I'll avoid that. My own personal experience with hybrids is that I found some a long, long time ago on one of our surveys, and I wasn't sure, so I called the other boat, and they had, I think, the person who wrote the field guide on board, and I said, hey, are you guys getting any hybrids?

And they said no. And I said, can I float you this bag so you can look? And I did that, and she called back and said, wow, those are hybrids, where'd you get them? And I said, right next to you guys. So those were mixed species and sexes.

In contrast to what's seen on the surveys, I think it's still going to be a little bit of grayness for the fishermen, but they're generally sorting through larger-bodied male crab, and I think at times there would be places with this new presence of more hybrids where it could be difficult. You know, if you're talking 2 or 3 in the morning in the Bering Sea snow crab fishing when it's very challenging conditions and you're asking guys to sort based on the things that the survey people sort and, you know, argue about for an hour on deck— this is one red-eye, this is one green-eye— which I've also been a part of those discussions, it's a real problem. And I think Um, to also quickly respond here, this isn't new in that hybrids are just now appearing. They've always been here. They've always been in background levels.

Um, I think it's fairly obvious that this is a new, um, scale for over the last 2 to 3 years, and it might continue. I think I noted in our, our, um, comment letter here that some further discussion, consideration, and real tractable solutions would be good to move on quickly because we could— I would hope to not show the same figure next year and have the orange or the pink bar be bigger than the brown bar.

Thanks for entertaining our additional questions. Yep.

Okay, thank you. Next up, we have Mr. Corey Lesher.

Thanks again, Mr. Chairman and members of the SSC. This time, for the record, my name is Corey Lesher with Alaska Bering Sea Crabbers. ABSC is a trade association that represents the majority of independent independent crab harvesters who commercially fish for snow, king, and tanner crab with pot gear in the Bering Sea and Aleutian Islands crab rationalization program. Again, thanks for allowing me the opportunity to provide some comment today. I'd just like to start, as always, recognizing the, the continued work of the crab and scallop plan team, the stock assessment authors, agency and industry researchers and the work of the Council and this SSC body to help us understand the rapidly changing dynamics of BSAI crab stocks.

I'd also like to thank the loan chair for the CPT presentation and summary provided today, and I was happy to hear the SSC engage with some of the hybrid questioning prior to lunch. I think I would been— I would have appreciated being able to testify, um, after that discussion when it was still fresh. Um, so hopefully you guys didn't eat too big of a lunch and are in a food coma right now. But, um, I'd like to speak to our comment letter, which, uh, points primarily to this hybrid challenge. Um, and so with my remaining time, to briefly, briefly characterize our comment letter The bottom line, as, as we've highlighted several times today, you know, the abundance of Chinascytes hybrids in the eastern Bering Sea really does present a management challenge, and it's an issue that we believe deserves immediate and maybe more focused attention.

This recent bottom trawl survey found that the industry preferred size of male hybrids increased to a new time series high with an estimated 52 million-plus pounds of industry preferred size male hybrids, and that's significantly increased from last year and approximately represents a third of all Chinascytes males observed in the survey. So Scott did a great job putting this into perspective with the the image that he showed, you know, and again, we're now in the second year of this record high abundance, and these are harvestable crab. And so again, going back to the figure that we were just looking at on screen, it's a very simple but contextual visualization that helps put these numbers into perspective. But the issue at hand, and one that we will likely face again in the future based off of, you know, the survey results, is that there remains a significantly large biomass of, again, harvestable hybrid crab that are essentially untouchable, and that's due to the low abundance of male snow crab and therefore a constraining TAC. So, I think Katie had a really great bullet summarizing some discussion from the crab plan team that was on the last bullet on slide 30 of this presentation that we saw earlier.

And in quotes, just to, to bring it up, in addition to recommended research avenues, it would be useful to have more information on federal policy and regulatory pathways to allow for future harvest and management of kinasedis hybrids. That was the crab plan team discussion, and I think that's really the key takeaway here, at least in regard to this hybrid challenge.

Having those discussions, those conversations, and I think it starts with the SSC and the council to provide guidance for the crab plan team and to how they can break down their time and resources. We've heard that they're a little shorthanded, and I think we all appreciate the stock assessments, but this is now the second year of a challenge that it's really worth addressing. And we might not get to it in time to harvest the hybrids that are out there this year on the grounds, but we really hope to have a workable solution in the coming years. If hybrids persist. And so I guess in closing, Mr. Chairman, you know, I'd just like to ask the SSC and the council at this meeting to task the crab and scallop plan team with prioritizing their time and resources to develop regulatory pathways to allow for those— the future harvest and management of the kinases hybrids.

And, I guess I'll end it there. That's all I have. Happy to take questions, and if it's helpful, I'd be happy to speak to crab industry operational questions if there are any. Thank you for the time.

Thank you for your testimony. Curry.

Yeah, thank you very much. I'm wondering if you could just sort of lay out your vision for what the optimal management strategy would be for hybrids. So right now we had a long discussion about the challenges in terms of separating them out in the catch. Obviously separating them out in the survey is a little bit different. We can sort of see consistency there.

Moving forward, given that it seems hard to target hybrids specifically in certain places in space or even as a function of depth, what would you recommend as as the way we approach setting a harvest limit for hybrids, or do you have any ideas that you would like the crab plan team to consider?

Yeah, through the chair, thank you, Dr. Cunningham. It's a great question. I don't know that I'm prepared to make those recommendations. I have lots of ideas. This is something that, that our industry and stakeholders have been talking about for over a year now.

We do lay out some of our thoughts in our comment letter. You know, a simple idea was, you know, a 4.5-inch cutline vessels that are delivering kinasedis smaller than 4.5 inches, or snow crab, or at least hybrids smaller than 4.5 would be classified as snow crab and 4.5-inch inches or larger. It could be bear die. Again, I think it's, it's worth brainstorming, whether that's industry workshop or SSC discussions, crop plan team diving into it. I think a combination of, of the bodies, you know, trying to come up with, you know, potential pathways.

I don't think that I have the solutions, but happy to share some, some more of our thoughts and ideas if that's helpful.

Chris.

I have some crab industry operational questions.

Can you talk a little bit about what it's like to encounter hybrid crab on the water, do they tend to travel together? Do they travel mixed with Tanner or Snow? You pull up a pot, is it all hybrid or all Snow or all Tanner? What, how does that work? How does targeting work?

Through the chair, Dr. Ernston, thank you for the question. That's probably a great question for a fisherman.

I I unfortunately don't have the experience on boats to, I think, to address that. I imagine that there are definitely pockets of, you know, very concentrated Bairdi crab, there are pockets of very concentrated snow crab, and there are mixed pots where you probably have a wide range of percentage hybrids.

And I would just add that I think our fishermen can do a very good job of identifying those areas. They are great at finding a way to catch the crab that they're targeting.

Okay, so maybe off the water, What can you say about the market for hybrids versus snows?

Again, through the chair, Dr. Anderson, probably a great question for, you know, for one of our processors in the room. I don't think I can speak to the market very well. I'm really falling short on these operational questions. Sorry.

Okay, thanks again for your testimony. Thank you. Next up, we will take, uh, Mr. Edward Paulson.

Yeah, Mr. Chairman, members of the SSC, my name is Edward Paulson. I'm a part owner in two vessels that fish crab in the Aleutian Islands and Bering Sea and have several comments regarding Apilio and hybrids and Bairdi. First, I recommend simplifying the Apilio stock assessment model so that it is mainly scaling the summer survey based on selectivity. The current Apilio model is overly complex and is have emerged from the survey regularly over the last 7 years due to the changes we've seen with the stock, and a model that relies more heavily on the survey data would provide an informative OFL and ABC and allow the CPT and SSC time to be freed up for more important tasks.

Second, I would urge the SSC to request a workshop to be held in the near future to help address the significant changes with the Kinocetes complex, which consists of Apileobairdii and hybrids. The workshop needs to be outside of the normal CPT schedule and consist of managers and scientists from BDF&G and Nymphs, as well as harvesters and processors. The workshop should focus on the surge of hybrids in the system and changes to the size and maturity specifically with Apileo. Hybrids have exploded in population and are likely to persist with the overlap of record western Bairdi and Apelio, with the overlap of western Bairdi and Apelio, as well as a record level of female abundance. And Apelio size of maturity has been an issue for some time now, and this summer we learned 96% of the mature males are terminally molting at sizes lower than industry preferred.

A workshop focused on these two issues, which overlap, would help bring together scientists, managers, and industry to help find to find a better path to account for and prosecute the Kinasedis complex. And ideally, this workshop would feed into the January CPT, which I hope we can have some time dedicated to these issues as well. Um, and I could go on with quite, you know, different ideas I have in terms of where we could go from here. But to be honest, I think this is why we need a workshop. It might have I have some good ideas, but I'm not sure how practical they really are because this stuff is complex.

And, you know, I think a workshop would go a long ways towards helping us, you know, bounce some ideas off of the experts to be able to feed into the CPT process. With that, I'll conclude my comments.

Thank you for your testimony. A question from Martin.

Um, yeah, hoping you are willing to address operational issues. Um, the question, I mean, just hypothetically, suppose the managers set a quota for hybrids that the industry could go out and catch Would they be able to do that? Would they be able to figure out how to target hybrids selectively in a way that wouldn't impose mortality on Tanner or snow crab?

Yeah, through the chair, it's a good question, and that's a question that we're struggling with, and it's exactly why we need to have a workshop, because, you know, we have that issue, plus we need to lower the size, I believe, of a pelio to better account for the fact that this average size of maturity for a peeleo is 3.1 inches, and all the other, you know, fisheries in the world are 3¾, and we're at 4 inch. So that further complicates things because you're probably okay if you lower the size to retain 3¾ to 4-inch peeleo. You want to protect true peeleo greater than 4 inches, and you want to target the hybrids that are inside, you know, all of those hybrids. I think there are ways to do it to protect those. I mean, we all agree we should protect those large true appealio.

And I think there's ways to do it. It's gonna be probably a little complicated. And, you know, in my mind, it might be more of a spatial management type of a situation where there's some certain areas you have to close to protect large traditional appealio. I'm throwing this out there as, that's, you know, something that's not well thought out. But I'm just saying there are potential ideas that I think could help us get there.

But it's going to— but in terms of hybrids, I do think that, you know, if we increase the quota, guys could go after more hybrids as well. This is not something new. I would point out that if you go back to the '90s, you know, my family had a boat that before rationalization we were fishing, it was the smaller boat we had in the fleet, and they would fish southeast of St. George, and that was traditionally where there were a lot of hybrids in the '90s, and it wasn't hybridizing with western bear die, it was hybridizing with eastern bear die.

Ah, go ahead, Martin.

So I'm wondering if something like what Sea State runs for, you know, the pollock fishery where they sort of monitor, have some real-time monitoring of catches that they could sort of feed the information back to the fleet, if a system like that would be potentially something that would, could be considered.

I think honestly industry is open to any solution that could protect those large males and give us more quota. And that's a— there is a model already for that. I think ADFNG does have in-season management authority in terms of being able to open and close statistical areas. I'm not really up on all that. Again, that's why we need a workshop.

But these are the type of things we need to start bouncing around. On if we want to be able to find a way to protect the appeal resource and, and prosecute hybrids as well.

Okay, well, thanks again for your testimony and for answering our questions.

Um, I believe I'll just take one more check. I think that's The list of our— yes, that was it for our public testimony. And I will just remind everybody that although we took a number of these comments under Tanner crab, they are broadly applicable across our items. And we will not only likely have some discussion of hybrids during snow crab, but we will also have some discussion during our wrap-up of the plan team report, and we may have sections in all of those that, that reflect some of these topics. So if you— this, if this, this was your chance to testify, don't feel like you're boxed in under Tanner-Crabbe.

It'll be, it'll be widely recognized across our agenda.

So with that, we will then move into our discussion for Tanner-Crabbe, and we'll go first to Curry. Yeah, thank you.

Well, I I guess I could characterize the public testimony we received. We'll do that in our minutes. I won't go into great detail here as we just heard it in real time, but I think there's sort of a couple of resounding pieces that we'll want to highlight. One is the importance of understanding, based on Scott's testimony, understanding some of the differences in how changes in survey design and survey gear under the survey modernization practice are likely to impact our assumptions about selectivity and the importance of trying to find opportunity for side-by-side comparisons with the Nephrops trawl. And of course, we'll have extensive discussion of what I think Corey accurately represented as the hybrid challenge in terms of a pathway forward to moving in a direction that allows the industry what appears to be a primary objective of having access to potentially target hybrids, if at all possible.

Okay. So we heard in, in terms of the presentation, a couple of key pieces here. There were outcomes from a CIA CIE review that took place in June, uh, 2026, um, the, the main terms of reference related to transition to GMACS, um, I think within that most of the, or all of the reviewers, CIE reviewers were, were supportive of moving in that direction. We'll talk a bit more about the realities of that further down. Um, other terms of reference in terms of CIE review that we can highlight were, um, You know, best uses for side-by-side survey data collected by Bering Sea Fisheries Research Foundation, TOES.

This, of course, connects with some of the questions about NIMP survey modernization. The discussion of Tier 3 reference points and the appropriateness of F35 and B35 is a larger topic for discussion, and I think the crab plan team, or I would suggest that the SSC support the crab plan team recommendation that this is a larger issue than just Tanner crab and something that needs to be considered across crab species, potentially including empirical approaches to identifying what more representative reference points might be that are applicable to different crab stocks.

The final kind of term of reference that was addressed in the CIE review was the question of whether or not a spatially explicit or, whether or not there were separate assessment models for each area were necessary, and overall, the CAE reviewer suggested that was not necessary, that there is likely, these are likely metapopulations with some exchange in between, and that this wasn't a top priority at the moment.

So overall, from the perspective of the tanner crab stock, there are very promising signs. This strong '23 cohort has continued to propagate through larger size classes. There's an extremely record high abundance of, or a high abundance of mature female crab and large increases in industry preferred male crab over the last several years. So all positive. In terms of the models that were brought forward by the assessment author, there were 3 At the request of the SSC, there's the sort of existing bespoke stock assessment framework built on the TC-SAM 02 framework, so that's 22.03D5.

This model, or this model framework, was originally introduced in 2017. This, of course, has been updated in 2026 with a variety of new data, both fishery and survey, as well as results from the new maturity workflow. So new model-based estimates of annual maturity for male crab. The two other model variants that were brought forward were two implementations in GMAC. So one is a functionally parallel structure to the existing status quo assessment model.

There are, despite a sort of a really lengthy and impressive effort to try to bring these two model frameworks or represent the existing bespoke model within the GMAX framework. There's a few minor differences that still remain, you know, things like the scale, whether log or natural scale, in which the parameters are estimated, some different slight parameterizations. But the author has done, I think, a really exceptional job of hearing our request to develop an exact exact parallel implementation and see whether or not you get the same answer. The other model variant that was brought forward is 26.2. It's in the GMAX framework, and this differs a little bit from the other GMAX version that— in that it estimates some of the parameters that were previously fixed and incorporates annually varying maturity.

Before we get into sort of recommendations on models, I think the SSC should should express their thanks to the author for a really extensive and multi-year bridging analysis to demonstrate the parallel structure of the existing bespoke model structure and GMAX. There were two appendices that described two kind of approaches to evaluating equivalency. One is to fix all the parameters, do one basically loop of the model to see if you get the same demographic predictions, the same estimate, or well, I guess predictions for management quantities and same likelihoods. And when you compare those two versions, the GMAX and the existing status quo model, all the quantities of interest are within 1%. I don't know if I've seen so many zeros before a percentage before.

They're functionally equivalent. The second version was to basically fit these two model variants parallel model variants to the same data and ask whether or not the estimated quantities and reference points are the same. In this case, you know, aside from differences during the spin-up period, we had a bit of discussion of the spin-up period, aside from the differences during the spin-up period, the model predictions for quantities, abundance, recruitment are very, very similar, usually within 10%. The OFL recommendation is within 7%. So I would say a pretty good demonstration of, of a nearly parallel structure when it comes to estimation.

Now, with that being said, there are a couple things that happened when at least these model variants were brought forward for the current assessment cycle. And so the authors demonstrated that with the existing TC-SAM bespoke model structure, the addition of new data, 2026 new data, really had no impact on estimates retrospectively for quantities of interest. There were a few differences in, like, the early 1970s in terms of fishing mortality rates, but fairly minimal. But when it came to fitting the GMAX version of the assessment to data through 2026, as we saw, there were some challenges in terms of convergence. There were challenges potentially thinking about the, the retrospective performance, and so the recommendation from the plan team and from the author was that these GMAX versions are really not ready for specification in this cycle.

I know there was sentiment from across the table that this has been a long process. And it certainly has. And I think I'm left wondering, I kind of, where we go from here. So the authors did an excellent job of demonstrating that they are functionally parallel model structures. They put in a lot of work to try to build in features from the legacy model into the GMAX framework and show that they give the same estimates when confronted with new data.

There's a challenge with model convergence. And, um, I guess all we— or at least my recommendation is that we support the Crab Plant Team and author's recommendation to use the existing model framework for this year's specification and encourage continued work to try to move towards, um, use of a GMAX model if there's a way to better understand why, you know, in the past, or at least when parameters are fixed, you get the same answer. When you fit the models to the same data in the past, you get very close to the same answer, but when confronted with new data, we end up with convergence challenges. And I think it's fair to ask at this point, you know, whether it's an issue of model complexity. Complexity and encourage the authors to continue to think about whether or not there are particular areas within the model structure where simplicity could be brought in.

And the first thing that came to mind for me was this sort of approach to the spin-up period.

So independent of whether or not we're talking about the sort of current status quo bespoke model or either of the GMAX versions, When they were fit to 2026 data, one of the interesting aspects was that they provided very similar fits to the data, right? The GMAX models didn't converge, the status quo model did converge, but actually, all of them had trouble fitting to the NIMS bottom trawl survey data. This has been a consistent challenge over time. So the assessment model misses some of the high points in the late '80s, the early '90s, and the late 2000s. Thousands in terms of the survey biomass.

There's also a lingering issue that arose in, in crab plan team discussion about the model potentially overestimating the abundance of larger size crab that's inconsistent with some of the size composition data. I think it's worthwhile that we use that as craft a recommendation to further explore this connection between overestimates of large size crab crab and the treatment of natural mortality after the molt to maturity.

So overall, I'd recommend that we, we support the author and crab plan team recommendation to move forward with the existing 22.03 D5 TC-SAM version of the model.

For specification this year. In terms of risk tables and risk, kind of across the board, Level 1, or normal, was assigned for the population dynamics, environmental ecosystem, and fishery performance categories. Level 2, concern, increased concern, was identified for the assessment-related considerations.

Primarily based on the failure of the model to fit the variation in the NIMS bottom trawl survey data. These are not— I think one of the benefits of the new design to the risk table is that I was able to clearly see what were new and emerging concerns versus past concerns, so I thought that was quite helpful.

The— I also appreciated within the assessment document, the author included Table A1, which is a description of the history of buffers that had been applied. This is also in the SAFE intro, but this, this had a bit of a more information in terms of what the author recommended buffer was, what the justification was, what the crab plan team recommended buffer was, and what the SSC recommended buffer was. So I thought that was useful in translating kind of the history of the risk table in this case. Into what the buffer recommendation was. The author recommended, and the crab plan team endorsed, a 20% buffer.

That's sort of been consistent, fairly consistent over time, almost without exception, and I would suggest that the SSC support that as well.

Um, let's see.

I don't know if we need to comment on it within our minutes, but of course, for Tier 3 crab stocks, there's the necessity of defining the reference period for average recruitment corresponding to the biomass producing maximum sustainable yield under prevailing environmental conditions. In the context of Tanner crab, that's— has been the 1982 to 2025 period. Sort of excluding the most recent recruitment estimate given its high uncertainty. Um, this has been the convention for several years now, and I would propose that we support that as well.

Um, in terms of recommendations moving forward, uh, I think we can potentially recommend that the authors revisit or at least recarry characterize kind of the necessity or the benefit of using the spin-up approach to representing the initial population dynamics in the pre-1973 period. It sounds like this may have been a previous crab plan team request, and so if so, hopefully it'll be short work for the author to revisit why this decision was made. My— at least my recollection was this is a bit of a legacy feature, and maybe it doesn't matter, but it also adds adds, I think, some complexity, and in the context of CRAB models, anywhere that we can reduce complexity, I think, is a benefit overall, particularly as we're trying to figure out why parallel versions converge in one platform and don't in another.

There, in public testimony and in our discussion, this hybrid challenge come up repeatedly, and of course, as, as our Chair pointed out, this is, we are likely to have recommendations that are in both Tanner crab and snow crab.

But I, I think despite our discussions last spring, there's obviously, at least within our body and for me, some challenges in fully understanding where we're able to separate hybrids from snow crab and where where we're not. It seems like at the fish ticket level, the answer is no, but I can't tell if that's because dockside, when you're unloading, you can't separate them out, or there's simply not a third box on the fish ticket. That would be an easy challenge, hopefully an easy challenge to fix. Seems like observers do a pretty good job of identifying hybrids, might be more challenging for fishermen under certain conditions to separate them out, out. But I think clearly identifying which sources of information can separate out hybrids and which can't would be incredibly useful, at least in considering what options might be available for addressing this hybrid challenge.

Um, in addition to that, we've had a lot of discussion and, and hopeful public testimony about, um, whether or not harvesters could effectively target hybrids in the event there continue to be additional harvest opportunity for hybrids, or if that were to move forward in some capacity.

We tend to get a mixed answer. One is that it's hard to tell and we don't know, or maybe we could effectively target them.

I imagine it, it depends a lot. And as Martin pointed out, there may be ways to share information that would make that easier if real-time information were available. So I think it's worthwhile that we recommend at least some consideration of ways that information could be shared amongst the fleet or made available in real time to help improve targeting to the extent that there is additional— to the extent that in the future there is additional harvest opportunity directed at hybrids that becomes available.

All right, I'll turn it over to others. Thank you.

Thanks, Kerry. We'll go next to Martin.

So earlier today, Kerry and I were comparing our communication skills. It was like, Kerry tends towards oversharing, and I'm sort of the opposite. So this will be— Um, so I'm— I support the going forward with the bespoke model and the buffer that Curry recommended. Um, I, um, sort of highlighted earlier that, that in the survey this year that there was this huge pulse of, um, exploitable, uh, CRAB or maturing crab going into the exploitable crab component of the stock, and I think that, that would be a recommendation to sort of study that and understand what's going on there.

I think we should echo the plan team recommendation to prioritize the transition to GMAX at the January modeling meeting and the March CPT meeting.

I was thinking a bit about the CIE's comments on the harvest policy, and at least I would recommend— we've asked for this was for snow crab, but I would asked for it also with Tanner crab to do a yield per recruit analysis, as well as providing the F0.1 as a potential alternative to the 35% target harvest rate, just to sort of start that discussion to look at sort of how yield relates to fishing mortality and whether there's other points on that line that would make more sense.

And I, I guess this is sort of in the larger context, I guess, but just whether or not the SEC should explicitly state that there is a need for management tools to manage the catch of hybrids, whether we want to— I think that there's something that the crab plan team said along those lines, and I, I wonder if people would be comfortable, or the rest of the SSC would be comfortable, making that kind of a clear statement to the council.

That's it. Thanks, Martin. Other SSC comments on Tanner crab specifically?

Franz. Yeah, I didn't hear it in the summary that Kerry and Martin gave, but in public testimony, we heard a pretty strong call for having some kind of workshop to figure out these hybrid issues, and I wonder if we wanted to make a recommendation along those lines, or what our thoughts are, or if we can do that through the usual iterative process.

Sherry?

Yeah, my first question actually was, I didn't quite hear Martin Was this your suggestion and Martin's? You said making a recommendation to the council. Were they the same thing? I, I missed the end of yours, Martin.

Just a comment that management tools are needed to— I mean, it's, it sort of glosses over whether anything is feasible or not, but basically that we, you know, given the current abundance of hybrids we need management tools to directly control the catch of hybrids.

Which may not be appropriate for us to see comments.

Yeah, I mean, I would take Jason's help on this as far as asking the Council to make Management steps, it's worded that way, I would say no, 'cause technically there's co-management, but the state is setting, sets the tack. And so, and there is, I mean, currently, like last year, there was a management action in that the snow crab TAC was— there was additional allowed for the catch-up hybrid. So there is action being taken. So if we're going to say that something to the council, I think we need to be very specific and then also careful that we're speaking to the right body. Um, as far as the workshop, I, um, I mean, aside from the normal just needing to be a bit careful in our wording, since workshop often includes public and work group and all that.

I, I'm still trying to grasp, um, I really appreciated— sorry, I have— you have somebody coming to see you. Um, I appreciated the public testimony, um, and they ask because there are certainly lots of things that we're talking about, but I'm still trying to grasp what the issue is that we're working on. So we talked last— I think it was last fall, we talked about hybrids. We talked about putting them into the assessment or not, and we made the recommendation not to, and to only do the tracking and catch. And so I think at this point my question is, are we looking for ways to account for them in the existing snow and Tanner assessments?

Are we looking to clarify catches? Are we looking to do— manage— give information or recommendations? There was a mention in public testimony of asking ADF&G to track and give management authority by statistical area. That there are a lot of different topics but I'm not positive. Personally, without a clear— without more clarity, I'm not sure that I would ask.

Personally, I wouldn't ask for a workshop at this point unless we have a clear direction that we're going. So, and maybe people have that, I don't know, but I just, I haven't been able to sort of piece that together. I, I guess my other struggle is that, so my understanding is that in order to, and perhaps other people may be able to help me with this, but I think that in order to open a fishery on hybrids, a hybrid crab needs to be in the FMP. However, you also then, I'm not certain what all is involved in that, but we don't know that hybrids are reproductively active as a population. So I'm not sure what all is, is needed, and I, um, I recognize that something needs to be done, but I think we just need to be a little bit careful, um, in making careful steps, I guess, as far as how we go about this, and that we're clear than what we're asking.

Jason.

I don't think I'm going to offer much clarity in terms of the language in regard to what the CPT said, but I feel at this point we're still sort of working through the issues in terms of accounting for the hybrids and how the hybrids might or might not be assessed in the assessment. So I, I get the sense that there's those type of research questions that remain, um, and then the public testimony, you know, was clear about discussing what are some options, um, you know, for moving forward in the future. And that's the component I I think that, you know, would sort of be the, you know, the next step if you were able to have that discussion into sort of what management might mean. So I guess I don't, at this point, I don't want to comment on the FMP or sort of that level of detail, but I feel like there's a number of scientific questions that were raised in our discussion that would be worth highlighting for the CPT to consider.

And the workshop, I don't, you know, we have limited resources and I don't know who does that workshop.

The CPT, you know, does have the modeling workshop, and I don't know if, you know, it's a suggestion maybe that some of those scientific questions could be discussed in the future, but I would leave that you know, I guess we could recommend something like that, but I wouldn't want to take away from the modeling aspects of that workshop. So I guess I'm caught. I don't know how to sort of recognize we want to do a workshop, we want to get more information in terms of what we could do with a hybrid management, but who sort of initiates that workshop is the question.

Got Chris Sidden online. Thanks your patience, Chris. Yeah, no worries. Just a couple of thoughts on this, and I think where we're all struggling is the fact that this is an iterative process that we're talking about right now. It's like there are science questions that we could focus on, but it depends on what some of the management and policy decisions that are made and when we want to, you know, send assessment authors down certain roads to do a bunch of modeling or those types of things.

If we have bookends from a policy standpoint. So for me, this is really a first cut of getting cards on the table of what are all potential options and having the folks from a management standpoint say yes or no or what might need to happen. And then also the assessment folks saying we can't do that or we can do that. I mean, I, the concern right now is the snow crab model, for example, is not very functional. So So that's not a super good option on the short term, but we need to have that conversation to see what other options are there.

So for me, this is a get the folks that know the ins and outs of the policy and the assessment and run those thought processes out far enough to come up with a short list of things to move forward. We can't— I don't think anyone can wait wait for the Council or the Board of Fish to make a change in policy and then the assessment authors do the science, and we can't really wait for the assessment authors to do the science if we don't know what that is without the management. So it really needs, for me, it just needs, we need to sit down and hash some of this stuff out. And it may not be a, I mean, the clear goal is to come up with a few options of how move forward. And it may be as vague as that, but it— the intent and the need to do this soon, I think, is fairly obvious to everybody.

So those are just my thoughts. Thanks.

Thanks, Chris. Chris Anderson.

Yeah, I I appreciate Chris Hiddens' analysis there and value Sherri's articulation of the question because I also am a little unsure what it is that I had been floating around thinking. I wasn't exactly sure how to— what we were being asked to do here.

But because you've articulated the question, I think a candidate response to that would be that I think the public and the Council and recent executive orders would be turning to the SSC to— for us to answer what needs to be known to manage these hybrid crab for optimum yield. When they are part of the crab catch.

And I think there's a— there are management components and management bookends, as Chris suggested, and that is useful in focusing that discussion. But I think, for example, what does it mean to put a hybrid in the FMP, or since it's not actually a species, does it belong there at all? And this brings to mind a couple cases globally where there are invasive crab stocks that are managed. So there's a red king crab stock in Norway, there's a blue swimming crab stock in Tunisia that are managed for yield in part of their range and managed for ecosystem integrity, allowing everybody to catch every crab there is outside of that range.

So I mean, bottom line, I think there's a fair amount of this crab in the water, and we do have an industry here that's had a pretty rough 5 years, and it's sort of feeling the opportunity costs of not being able to access that crab and not being sure how it's reflected in the science that determines what they can catch.

So I think if I were to convene a workshop, it would be around what, what does this mean and what are the things we can do?

Thanks, Chris. Um, so I'm going to propose a partial path forward at the moment, which is that, um, I think for Tanner specifically, we don't have pressing recommendations specific to hybrids. In terms of assessment structure and approach. And I'm hearing a couple questions that might— we might be able to get some level of clarification on when we tackle snow crab, um, or at least have a little bit further discussion. And I think what we're all leaning toward is a discussion that's probably going to fit more likely in our general plan team recommendations than under Tanner.

So I'm going to propose that we just put a pin in this for the moment. We move on to snow crab, crab plan team, everybody gets a chance to think about it, and then we'll, we'll revisit in an hour or two when we get there. I know that's not very satisfying, but I feel like let's make sure we have all the information we're going to have before we figure out where we need to go on this. Everybody okay with that? Okay, then I will go ahead and summarize Tanner, I actually give the opportunity.

Is there any, any other specifics to Tanner that we want added to the summary?

Okay, uh, we— Curry did it, and Martin and everybody did a great job. There's a lot here. I'll just try to touch the highlights. We will, of course, this is influential public or scientific information. We will characterize public testimony, particularly highlighting the importance of understanding differences in survey design and gear, which could affect selectivity and future side-by-side comparisons, and of course the hybrid topics that have come up.

We will summarize the CIE review outcomes, including the support for transition to GMAX, the best uses for side-by-side data, the Tier 3 reference point discussion, and I think on that latter, we will support the crab plan team recommendation to expand the consideration of Tier 3 reference points beyond just Tanner crab and to look at new, new approaches beyond those. We will agree that a two-area model is not likely necessary and definitely not a top priority at this point in time. We will note within the Tanner stock the strong 2023 cohort, which is now leading to high abundance of females and males, many positive signals from this stock. We will summarize the 3 models that were brought forward, including the existing framework in TC-SAM, the 2 GMAX model implementations, the, the bridge and the one with minor differences remaining, and 26 6.2, which adds additional parameters and time-varying maturity. We will thank the author for the extensive work to bridge and develop GMAX while simultaneously really, really encouraging actually getting to GMAX next year.

We will note our appreciation that this has been a really good demonstration of having a parallel structure and a full bridge across these. But some concern that the new data had little effect on the existing model but caused convergence challenges for GMAX, um, may be causing us to have some question about both of those frameworks at the moment. However, we will support the existing base model in agreement with the crab plan team and the author, along with the 20% proposed buffer. We will note that the stock is not overfished and that overfishing did not occur and will support the basis years for the reference point calculation. We will also, looking forward now to research recommendations, we will support continued work toward using the GMAX model, particularly addressing model complexity and perhaps working towards simplifying it to make it more robust to future data.

This may include exploration of overestimates of large crab and the interaction or potential interaction with treatment of natural mortality after mult— maturity. We will suggest a revisitation of the relative merits of using a spin-up rather than more commonly applied initial conditions to see if there can be some simplification there. We will also recommend studying the— using this opportunity of this large pulse of crab entering the mature biomass to study the dynamics of that that group of crab and perhaps learn more from this ongoing natural experiment. We will ask again for snow crab and now for Tanner crab for a yield per recruit analysis to help, perhaps to help inform the Tier 3 reference point considerations. We will, at least for Tanner crab, we will note the issue of hybrids, the magnitude, and the challenges in fully understanding where we are and aren't able to separate these crabs.

And particularly, or at least in the Tanner crab, and likely well beyond, we will request some clear identification of which sources of information can and can't be delineated. And I think— and perhaps note that there is the potential here for some information sharing, even under the existing approaches to hybrids, that could benefit the situation. And I think I'll put a pin in the rest of the hybrid discussion there. So if there was anything else that I missed, raise it now. Okay.

Otherwise, we will cap off Tanner. And 3:15, take an afternoon break for 15 minutes and restart with Snow Crab back at the half past the hour.

Okay, if everybody could come back to the table, we're about ready to get started.

Okay, back to you, Katie, for snow crab.

Great, thank you. Oh, it worked for a little bit. Oh, maybe it's working now. Maybe it's working now. Okay.

Or maybe not. Maybe it just doesn't like me. I'm just going to use a little arrow. Okay, on to snow crab, a final assessment. And as, as Ian pointed out, a lot of— there's some slides in here that will address some of the hybrid, I think, questions, and we can address more of those as we go through here.

Um, snow crab is a stock that we do have an ESP for. Uh, the ESP authors helped me put together here just a brief summary of those. Um, in general, uh, snow crab juvenile, snow crab energetic condition was remained hot, was high in, um, 2026, suggesting high survival. Uh, the cold pool extent and, um, the amount of waters less than 0 degrees in 2026 was encouraging Then also the spring sea ice extent increased substantially in 2026 and is above the time series mean. So all the things we already heard about, those are, those are kind of predictive currently for snow crabs.

So this is an ESP that uses the, the new methods that Aaron put— Aaron presented to us in May, which I'm drawing the blank of that right now. But so we do have updated metrics is looking at predictive and contextual skill there. The, uh, oops, uh, the one thing that is contextual that we are tracking, and this will come up, is that there's a pretty skewed female operational sex ratio. There's currently 85 mature female for every 1 greater than 95mm large crab, large male crab. And then, however, it— this goes back to a previous previous, um, conversation on percent of empty clutches, only about 3% of mature females had empty clutches, which is really low, which still suggests that there's high reproductive potential.

And so what does that mean? There was some conversations earlier about like what could that mean for future potential hybrids if depending on who those females are mating with. Um, and then some other contextual Things like bitter crab disease and Pacific cod predation have remained below average in recent years. No concerns with mature male snow crab center of abundance. It's near the average.

And then, I think was already mentioned in Emily's conversation, the size at 50% maturity remains near the average, although this indicator has been trending down for the past 3 decades. I think there's one more slide on here. Oh, fishery-informed just, uh, part of the ESP. We do have a skipper survey for this, uh, stock also. Uh, both CPE and total effort for this fishery remain below— were below average this last year.

Fishing during this last season shifted substantially to the southeast, which is consistent with about 60% of the skippers reporting that weather, sea ice, and high sorting and fuel costs motivated this change in behavior.

Although, however, greater than about 50% of the skippers reported an increase in perceived abundance of industry preferred males relative to the previous open season, and that 47% of skippers noted slightly more to a lot more hybrid crab than the previous season. And some of that could be due to the spatial shift of the, of the fishery to a more southeast distribution. So So just some con— all right, so this came up earlier, but the snow crab fishery last year was open with a tag of 9.3 million pounds. CPE was down from the previous season. The fishery did occur in the typical fishing grounds.

You'll see that in the weighted catch centers, bottom right figure, kind of shows the last open fishery in green. Really small, sorry about that, I was trying to fit a lot here. ADFNG and the tax setting process provided what we are terming a hybrid opportunity. There was 1 million pounds added to the total snow crab tax, so that was the total of 9.3, and encouraged targeting in an area of high hybrid abundance that we saw in the survey. So the bottom, the top, very top right figure there kind of shows the The Pribilof Islands and those green survey statistical areas were like the areas that we saw hybrid, high hybrid abundance in the, in the survey.

They're also areas that aren't like the core snow crab area, so we encouraged folks to attempt to, if they wanted to directly harvest or target hybrids, they were encouraged to do so in those areas. The middle figure there, shows the observed hybrid encounters based on our observer data, and you can see that those didn't really occur in that red box. They occurred kind of south and west of that red box. And that was anecdotally the information we got when we chatted with our folks in Dutch Harbor at ADF&G was that a lot of the fishermen, that some of the fishermen that did go and try to target hybrids in that area said that they weren't really finding a lot of targets in the hybrids in that area, and that a lot of the hybrids that were reported in the retained catch were actually reported from bycatch or co-harvesting in the Tanner crab fishery. So that, that was a kind of disconnect between potentially where hybrids are in the survey timing versus where hybrids are during the timing of the fishery, which makes, you know, attempts for like spatial management allocation a little bit more challenging when it comes to ADFNG's authority in that.

So I will say that of that 1 million-pound hybrid opportunity, the estimated from our retained catch time series is about 678,000 pounds of hybrids were harvested of that. So So I'll pause and see if there's any questions on this before I keep going, just because I know there were questions earlier.

Jason, go ahead.

Yeah, this is a continuation, I think, of our earlier discussion. I'm— so I'm just trying to sort of sort through what catch is typically included in this assessment. I noted that the author did a good job responding to our past comments, and we had a comment in there agreeing with the CPT that this was from 2026, that it was premature to include hybrid catch data in the snow and Tanner assessment models, and that the author said that hybrid was not included in the snow crab model. But I, I guess I was kind of wondering after our last exchange whether if that was really the case or not. So I'm hoping maybe you can kind of clarify where we're at with that data.

Through this here, Jason, yes. So, and this may be some of the transferring of authorship with snow crab and like confusion there, but what hybrids currently are part of the retained catch time series, and that's the only time series that hybrids are part of. And I believe retained catch is going into the snow crab model. I believe they have retained and total, so it wouldn't be part of total, but it would be part of retained catch. What I did clarify with our ADF&D staff specifically, I was chatting with Tyler Jackson, he said that about 95% of our offloads are observed at dockside, so we do have accounting there of like how many of those retained catch that are being landed potentially are hybrids.

So we do have that ability to potentially produce a retained catch data stream that didn't have hybrids if that was desired. I think the— when it comes to an accounting against the OFL, like for overfishing, we would have to include those because technically they are counted as IFQ for snow or tanner one way or the other. They have to be— like, I think Curry's comment earlier about like the fish chicken having a box, it's like they— right now in the FMP, there's only two recognized kind of CDs, stocks, snow crab or Tanner crab. And because it's a rationalized crab fishery, the crab have to be allotted into one of those two categories on a fish ticket. So the fish ticket data would have a value for, let's say, snow crab.

We at ADFG could produce a retained time series for modeling aspects if desired that would, using proportion for those observed, you know, brailers of doxide that could say, okay, this proportion potentially are hybrids, if that helps.

Yeah, that's, that's helpful. So, okay, so the, so the retained catch series is snow and hybrid. The survey, but the survey indices are are just snow? I just want to make sure I understand that. Okay.

Yes, through the chair, the survey indices are just snow. So what— when we asked the author to, um, authors to provide sensitivities last May, what they did is they did include, uh, hybrids in the survey data, and they included hybrids in the total catch in those sensitivities. But right now, those are not included in the assessment model.

So I'd like to follow up on that question. Given the magnitude at the— in the last couple of years, that's— the model must have been quite sensitive to the addition of hybrids in terms of the result at the very end of the time series.

My recollection when we looked at that in May is it was not.

I think that part of that is the models, you know, models are made to kind of interpolate over many years, and this is— that was only one year, and it was the terminal year where we saw— because right now, we— last year when we asked authors to do that sensitivity, we only had one year of increased hybrids, and it was that terminal year. And we're most uncertain in those years, right? We don't have have the other side to kind of bookend the growth and how the population is progressing. So I don't have a good idea if the models would respond differently to 2 years, but my indic— my familiarity with the modeling process and the models is that it would take a few years of increased hybrids to actually see much difference in the model output.

One last follow-up. Did the authors produce the REMA model as well for a combined survey index? Because obviously that one would have to be sensitive because it is really just the average of the survey abundance. Uh, through the chair, no, they did not. Um, we did not request that.

Sherry, next. Can you just clarify, you said that the hybrids are part of the retained catch, they are or are not part of the total catch? Through the chair, Sherry, they are not part of the total catch. Our total catch estimates are done based on observer, um, potlet, observer pots. The observers do separate out snow crab, Tanner crab, and hybrids.

We're extrapolating total catch based on just the pure counts and measurement of those pure species, not the hybrids. So total catch does not include hybrid.

Thank you.

Chris Anderson next.

Yeah, I guess also clarifying question, what exactly is the relationship between the 9.3 million-pound tag, the additional million-pound hybrid opportunity and the harvested 2/3 of a million-pound hybrid? What— how does that play out?

Through the chair, so I, um, I get— if I interpret your question right, it's the— how— there was no, um, When ADFNG established this hybrid opportunity, we did so under the auspice that an additional million pounds of removals, if the removals were purely of snow crab and no hybrids, our thought processes wouldn't be detrimental to the snow crab population for that to occur. So we went into it with the assumption that if no hybrids were caught, that the removal of snow crabs would be within a biologically appropriate target. There's no— there was no— this was an opportunity that we provided with some guidance, but there was no ramification, like there's no consequences for it. It was kind of— it was an experiment to see, like, did this work? Were they— was there actually targeting of hybrids occurring?

So there was no I guess that's— yeah, that's all I really— I don't know if there's a follow-up there or not. Go ahead. Let me throw out some wrong ways I could be reading this, and you correct me.

Um, 10.3 million pounds of quota were issued? Uh, it was 9.3 million. So the original Chokreb TAC was 8.3, and we added a million, so the total TAC was 9.3. So sorry about that, that's not clarified up there. Yeah, okay, then the fact that less than 1 million pounds of hybrid was retained, does that mean that we potentially harvested 8.7 million pounds of snow crab?

Yes, I don't remember exactly how— through the chair, sorry— I don't remember exactly how close the retained catch was to the TAC. It was— wasn't quite the whole TAC, but it was pretty close to it. Um, so technically it means that potentially we went over that $8.3 million for Snow Crab. I don't remember, I'd have to go back and look at that because we didn't evaluate it that way, we just evaluated it as total. Um, but that, that could have potentially happened.

Jason. Okay, I think, I think this is a language thing, but I want to make sure. So when you say total catch and then you said that that was estimated with the observer data, is that, is that the retained catch from the fish tickets plus discards of observer data, or is that just an estimate of what you think was total separate from the observer data? What I'm trying to figure out is if the, when the hybrids are counted against the TAC ABCs and OFLs, or sorry, let me rephrase but what I'm trying to figure out is if the hybrids are being accounted against the ABC and OFL and TAC right now. So when you say total catch, I'm trying to figure out if the hybrids are part of that total catch.

Through the chair, I'm going to try it. I feel like I'm— I feel like some of the confusion might be how I'm utilizing total catch. Sorry about that. The data stream that's going into the model model is the expanded observer CPE. So we take the observer CPE and we expand that to get an estimate of the total number of crab that the fishery has interacted with, right?

When it comes to— that is done just for those crab that we determine are snow crab, because it's based on the observer CPE of snow crab expanded. So when it comes to what we retained catch, that's the number that are being landed on the fish tickets. Does that help maybe?

Okay. Franz, so your retained catch can exceed total catch?

Yes, through the tier, yes, yes, technically that was 'cause some of the difficulties, Tyler tried to produce a total catch time series for the hybrids in particular, and that was what he was finding, was that the retained catch was actually above the total catch, most likely due to the fact of, like, the observer pots and spatially where they were observed, the fact that a lot of the retained catch for hybrids was actually brought in as, as during the Tanner fishery, because a lot of those folks have dual IFQ. So that probably has to do with a lot of those things, but yes, that is— that because of the way they are calculated, they are different independent data sources. So yes, that can occur.

Rob? Yeah, thanks, Katie. This is another clarifying question for myself. So No, the hybrids are recorded as snow, and, and that's a policy decision, not a biology decision. So if we had the sufficient biological information, this might be a different conversation.

If, for example, they're more biologically and on a habitat side to more related to Tanner crab, for example, right, and the tender crab population? Through the chair, yes, so that's actually great. I wanted to clarify this, and you're— my answer will hopefully help with that. The way that the regulation is in place is any crab that has red eyes and an M-shaped mouth is a Tanner crab. Every other kind of Cetus crab is lumped into snow crab.

So the reason the hybrids end up being counted as snow crab is due to that biological definition right now in of what a Tanner crab is. So with— oh, sorry, can I follow up? Okay, so with— if we had all the information we wish we had, this conversation might not be relevant. We'd be talking about it either in terms of the Tanner crab assessment or an independent Through the chair, there's a lot of information that I think we would have to have, um, yeah, to understand. Um, just the— I think Sherri, like, made a point of this too, just understanding the reproductive viability.

Are they reproducing on their own? Is the next generation as reproductively viable as the first generation? Can hybrids hybridize with each other, or do hybrids only mate with other snow and tanner crab? So I think there's lots of questions there But when it comes to the policy side of things, the FMP has two rationalized fisheries for kinocetes, snow and tanner. The legal definition in state statute is of what a tanner crab is, and it just says basically the assumption is that anything that's not a tanner crab is a snow crab.

So ideally, yes, if we had potentially other biological characteristics that could help us characterize all of them, them, that would be a step in the right direction. Um, but that would still, in my mind— and I might— I'm stepping outside of my wheelhouse a little bit— um, in my mind, my interpretation of that is that if we had a, a pure designation of this is what a hybrid is and we could tell it apart from a Snow and Tanner, that we would then have to amend the F&P for them to be a different stock. Because right now there's only two stocks that are recognized in the F&P, and it's a rationalized fishery for both those stocks. So folks have IFQ for either tanners or snow or both, but they wouldn't— there's no hybrid portion of that right now.

Okay, please proceed.

All right, all right. So where we're at with snow crab, uh, we have a new assessment author that, uh, took over in May, Grant Adams, and he presented some work towards trying to help with the convergence issues. We asked him to continue to present those during September, but we didn't as a CPT spend a lot of time on those Tier 3 GMACs models, mostly because none of them had convergence, so we didn't prove them being acceptable for setting specifications. The author did present the REMA smoother, what we were calling the Tier 4 smoother, but just the REMA smoother of the morphometrically mature biomass, which was the accepted model last in 2025 for, for specification setting. There was some conversation at the CPT because author brought forward potentially different ways to, to look at the OFL calculation as far as whether it should use the Bärenhoff catch equation or not.

We did kind of go back to, you know, this is meant to be a fallback simplified version, so we kept the same OFL calculation that we had had in previous years, which is it does use the ramped harvest control rule, but just applies that FOFL to the terminal year biomass and doesn't account for other biological processes, mostly because this is a smoother of the survey data at the time of the survey. It doesn't— it's not a population dynamics model that accounts for population processes and/or fisheries removal, and just keeping it simple for those reasons.

The Tier 3 GMEX models that the author did bring forward, explored some different data corrections, updated data. They did do a model run to truncate the model to 2019, which is something that we have— we had asked for to kind of see if avoiding the mortality event would allow the model to converge. It did not. And they did have a male-only model. The male-only model did converge at a higher rate.

It didn't converge at— 30% of them converged, I guess. So it was better than the So, but that was promising. What the— I'm kind of getting to my recommendations, which I'll get to in a couple slides, but potentially promising for future exploration on the Tier 3 level. New data, of course, is what we have for most of these assessments, which is new fishery data, bycatch data, and new survey data. I will point out here that the survey data here is corrected, that, that net spread spread correction is in the survey data in these models.

The notes here that the author wanted to put forward is that the preferred males, which are those greater than 101 millimeters, was the fourth lowest in the 45-year time series. And then, as you know, there is a rebuilding plan in place for the stock. The current status based on the, uh, REMA smoother and Tier 4 assessment is the stock is, is not overfished overfishing is not occurring, but of course it is, is not rebuilt. The current status is 0.747 for, for the last fishing year.

So survey trends for male snow crab. I left this, put the slide in here just to give you an idea. The author plotted here this and this for the observed survey biomass for the 3 different portions of the male crab. So the morphometrically mature male, you can see there, is the larger of the three, and then of course large males at 95, and then preferred males at 101. And just to kind of get an idea of the percent change from last year for each of those size groups, and that observed— this is, this is of course observed survey by MS, not model output.

And then just, just to kind of point out that how you interpret the reproductive potential of males might decide how stable the, the stock is, which is nothing new to you with us. We've been talking about that for a few years now, but maturity as size was pretty low for 2026, which Emily did bring up in the survey presentation. Number of crab that are terminally molting into that preferred size is pretty low. So here's the fallback RIMA model. The author did provide REMA smoothers for all 3 of these different components of the male population.

We did focus on the morphometrically mature portion of that for setting specifications. You can see that gives the smooth biomass estimate, and then the BMSY proxy for that time period was— is listed there also. And that uses the time period from 1982 to 2026. There was some discussion that came up during SNOWCRAB, and this is something that the CPT did want a little bit of guidance on, is how much exploration the SSC or folks might want us to look at, what years we're using for BMSA proxy. There's a little bit of conversation at CPT of maybe that should only include years that the fish fishery was open, if it's really meant to be a proxy of fishing at FMSY or BMSY.

But for right now, we did not recommend any changes to this. We just kept it with the whole time period, but similar to what we did last year or what was proposed last year. And that calculate— that using the simplified— oh, well, not simplified, but the fallback OFL calculation that we have approved in previous years that Tanner Bristol Bay have presented in their fallback option. The resulting OFL here was 21.22 kilotons. The author did present what they deemed as a Baranoff catch equation version of OFL that did account for natural mortality.

The CPT noted that, yeah, in an ideal world, accounting for natural mortality between the time of the survey and the time of the fishery would be helpful. However, trying to keep this as a fallback and kind of simplified version, we didn't recommend any changes in the OFL calculation. That is something that under, you know, if we were to— I think we have— not we, but the authors have presented other options there in the sense that like growth and molting occurs between the survey and the fishery. Like, what what should be included in that, and right now we just kept it as the OFL being presented is the simplified fallback OFL calculation.

Look at that. Okay, I thought I had another slide there. Oh, I do. Okay, for some reason switched up the order on this one. I put the risk table before my recommendations.

I don't know why, but this is actually really hard to to read here, but the assessment author here kind of put together this in a little different format. This is where we will circle back to formatting a little bit in April. Instead of two rows here, they have two columns and then the rows are different categories. I don't know why, but do have different levels for each of those. So that's something that the CPT didn't go into in depth, but something we need to talk about in April is how to, to look at levels for these different rows and, and deal with that.

I will say that the current year concerns, some of those concerns with the fact that the OFL is based on the terminal biomass, you know, the OFL right now is based on calculation of the OFL at the time of the survey, and that may be biased between the time of the survey and the time of the fishery as to how many of those crab are available to the fishery because of growth and molting and natural mortality.

So there was a—. Katie, we have a question. Oh, sorry, sorry, sorry. Go ahead, Chris. Thanks, Ian.

Katie, just to clarify, in that first column, first row on the risk table, it says level 2. This is last year. If I if I remember correctly, and it's based on increased concern on the Tier 3 models that didn't converge and that were not used. Is that correct?

Through the chair, yeah, it looks like that's what the author has listed here. It's based on the Tier 3 models that are previous concerns.

Um, so that's a little misleading since we utilize the Tier for the REMA smooth Tier 4 approach, correct? Yes. Okay, thank you. I think this may be a product of things that were in the risk table previously because the CPT did recommend a Tier 3. Totally, that's fine.

I just want to make sure. Yeah, so there needs to be— there definitely needs to be some formatting and consistency improvements with the risk table format. I think what I'm going to do right now is jump to recommendations and we can come back to this, but I think we spent a little less time with the risk table with snow crab just because we are using the RIMA Tier 4 fallback. And so we did discuss some concerns, but that were— that are captured in the risk table, but not all of what's in the risk table corresponds to the Tier 4 fallback or the RIMA fallback. Assessment.

So using that RIMA fallback Tier 4 harvest control rules last year, that was what was approved for specifications by the SSC, and a 40% buffer was used. And from our recollection of the reading this, this SSC minutes, that was kind of gathered as like an average of the last 5 years, and it we came up— the idea was that we used a 40%, there was a 40% buffer. The CPT recommended an increase to a 50% buffer for these main reasons that we have listed in our minutes. Only 3.5% of the terminally molted males molted into the industry preferred size range, so just kind of concern over the conservation of large males in the population. I don't know, recruitment seems to be low.

That's not really accounted for in the current fallback. It's just the survey biomass of morphometrically mature males. I'm having a hard time talking today, sorry. The sex ratio is highly skewed, and so we felt like this was definitely a concern, like the having 85 mature females for every 1 mature male male crab of a, you know, size that we think is competing for reproductive potential seemed really, really high and skewed, and there was concern there. Morphologically mature male biomass is used to calculate the OFL.

I think this— we've kind of talked about this back and forth, but the CPT is still concerned over— we didn't recommend any changes to how— what we're using for maturity in the OFL calculation, but we do still have concerns over having consistent— not making sure we're not overharvesting those large, potentially reproductively more important males in the population. And then there was some talk of having this, this fallback method of calculating the OFL could be potentially biased high because it doesn't account for natural mortality. It also doesn't account for growth or recruitment either, so there was some concern there. So the CPT recommended a slightly higher buffer than last year, kind of due to those increased concerns. In addition, we recommended, of course, continuing with Tier 3 model explorations, specifically the male-only model, and asked the author to bring forward potentially work on the male-only model in the January modeling workshop.

Workshop if time allows and the author has the ability to make progress before then. And the answer there is like not only a male-only model, but potentially simplifying the model further, like potentially fixing parameters or removing parameters from estimation to try to provide some simplicity to this model that might allow for it to converge on a more consistent manner. And then the CPT did ask for some feedback on if the fallback RIMA smoother were to be used another year, should we request that the authors investigate other time series for reference points specific to the BMSY proxy calculation? Should we look at something that includes only those years where the directed fishery was prosecuted versus the entire time series, or other potential avenues there? I will say, I kind of already brought this up, CPT want, you know, and as a whole still has concerns over the potential overharvesting of the large males in the stock, um, and the concern that the majority of crab currently are terminally molting, um, to a smaller size than the harvestable size.

And then of course, leading into all these kinds these concerns are also the, the complication of the hybrids, right? So hybrid consider— considerations are really complicated by the current status of the snow crab stock, especially the number of industry preferred or large males out there. So we didn't, we didn't really discuss much about hybrids pertaining to, to snow crab just because we didn't have a modeling process to include those hybrids right now, but we did have a pretty good conversation of hybrids during our snow crab discussion and just like understanding, as I think we've already kind of vocalized, of the amount of biological information, research information that we would love to understand about hybrids to understand better about how to account for them in our, within our current management process. But then that's also where we pointed out like if there were to be ways that we can account for them that don't fall into our current current management, I mean both federal and state, like TWITE management. You know, what would— if there were ways that we could account for those, if there is a way that we suddenly can identify a hybrid of snow and tanner in the catch and we wanted to have a dedicated hybrid catch, what would be the ramification— what would be the policy and management legal implications of that and what would need to be done in order to allow for that?

Not saying that we're there right now. We're not there, but if we have science and research that's ongoing, kind of understanding what— the best way we can direct science is by understanding what we— the information that we need to make a better decision on the management side. So kind of those conversations need to, as we've already chatted about already, need to be happening at the same time so that the science can best inform the next steps forward. So I think with that, I'll pause. I think that's my last no-craps slide.

Jason.

Quick question. The CPT on the 50% buffer mentioned that recruitment appears to be low. I want to ask where the recruitment came from. Was that from the Tier 3 model or was there some other indices used? Through the chair, Jason, I believe that's like just based on what we're seeing seeing in the survey.

Size compositions, yeah. So it's not, um, that gets sometimes confusing when we talk about recruitment in crab, but I think it's just looking at the, the size bins, the smaller size bins that we're seeing in, in the coming up in the survey and, and how prevalent they are. Kind of going back to, I think, Emily's earlier, way back this morning, uh, so I had like size composition figures and just not seeing much at that smaller size bins.

Dana, uh, Curry, then Dana. Thank you. Um, so a couple of questions. Um, for the first point under the, the increase in buffer, so only 3.5% of terminally molded males molted into the industry preferred size range. I always kind of go back and forth in my mind whether or not that's a conservation concern, or it in fact means that a large portion of the male population is unavailable to harvest.

I'm wondering if you could kind of walk me through the logic for why that's a concern versus this is sheltering a bunch of males that'll never be harvested and therefore we should be less concerned.

Uh, through the Cherokee, uh, oh, this is a hard, um, it's not hard, it's just like when we looked at a lot of the research that's out there, which we have done over the past well, since the snow crab collapse, a lot of the research coming out of Canada shows that there's some— there's correlation with the number of large males you have in the population and the number of crab that are delaying that molt to maturity and be getting larger. Like, do they need to grow or can they mate right now? And so some of it is, you know, they can mature earlier because they're needed, and you see a lot of that great disproportion between females males, right? So why not mature? Because then you can pre-reproductively, assuming that you are reproductively successful.

I think that's the other thing, is like really not understanding what size is the most reproductively successful for snow crab, and whether those smaller males are reproductively successful is something that we don't have a good handle on, right? So that's part of it. I think the other Concern is if, if by chance we buy— we, you know, our population is similar to the Canadian population, and in order to have more large males you need to have some large males in the population, it seems that we would want to conserve the large males we have so that we can encourage crab to grow and become larger. So kind of depends back to comes down to what you're managing for, the sustainability of snow crab as a species or as a fishable resource. And that's something that we have talked about the past few years, right?

And so I think that kind of lies into which way you fall on that. Like, just having mature males of any size, is that okay if, for, you know, for maintaining snow crab as a species, uh, potentially could be, um, when it comes to, you know, optimizing for maximum fishery yield, maybe not. So I think that's what we've struggled with and we've tried to articulate, and I know we've gone back and forth with you guys on this, and we're really trying to, to be as clear as possible with like, we're not recommending changing the morphological immature, um, we're not recommending changes to that here, but we are just flagging that we're still concerned over making sure that there's large crab in the population. If we, you know, some of this was brought up when we were talking about Tanner crab, we're seeing more large Tanner crab. Well, there's also a lot of large Tanner crab.

Potentially there could be some feedback loop there. And without understanding that well, kind of hedging our bets that we might want some of those large males to get more large males is where we're at, I feel like.

Yeah, thank you. I, I— that's really helpful, and I think it is very compelling, right? There's a concern about growth, there's a concern about potentially depleting very large males that may have an asymmetrically high benefit in terms of reproduction. I think perhaps where we get wrapped around the axle is comparing this to the industry preferred threshold. Like, this could be articulated as the size at which individuals' molt to maturity is now X percent lower than it in the past, but maybe that's just me rather than others.

Through the chair, though, that would be a good— that would be a good way to frame it in the future. So thanks for that suggestion.

One other follow-up question we had in public testimony. There was sort of a clear call for some sort of workshop to address how to deal with this hybrid issue that was outside the normal sort of planned team cycle. I'm wondering, what are your thoughts on that? Is this something something that can be encapsulated within a January modeling workshop? Again, there's more than enough on your plate for that.

Is this something that should be dealt with as a separate workshop? Is this— what do you see as an optimal pathway forward? Uh, through the chair, Curry, I don't know if I have an optimal pathway, but I think it would be challenging. I feel like the folks that we need around the table for that type of discussion are, are not It's not the same group that we typically are modeling workshop is the assessment authors and other quantitative folks within the CREB modeling. It's pretty highly technical, usually spend a lot of time working on GMAX.

It's a different group of folks than I think would be together to solve some of these other problems. I think in order to— workshop in my mind would have both pretty good industry participation on like what is feasible. Produce a lot of ideas, and if that's not feasible on the back deck of a boat or in a processing plant, like, how is that really helpful? So I think it needs to be a more holistic approach. I think it would be helpful to have that occur between now and April if we want to ask assessment authors or anyone to bring forward something else in our April meeting.

But I have a hard time with making it a focus of our January modeling workshop because I just don't think that's the purpose of that. And right now we do not have a CPT meeting slated for that. It's just modeling workshop. Um, and I do think that— modeling, yeah, yeah. So I do think that it would be helpful for it to be potentially even outside of a CPT-led meet, like somehow be a group of folks that come together with potential— my mind, just frameworking different paths forward.

Board and what is needed and if there are data that we can ask folks to look at between, you know, hey, this would be great to look at. Can we look at this for April? Can we look at that for April? I mean, that's kind of what we ended up doing outside, kind of just within the agencies for last May meeting. We saw this increase in hybrids in September.

We got together, just, you know, NOAA folks and ADFG folks and say, okay, what are our different data streams? What can we look at to present May to say this is what we know about hybrids, this is what we don't know about hybrids. And we did that, but then we kind of exhausted that, those data streams, and I think we need to widen that, that box a little bit. But I don't know what the best framework for that is.

Thank you. Dana. Yeah, thanks, Katie. Um, in terms of the 4 points up here, it seems like, uh, only one of those points, the first one, is of the one you're hanging your hat on because the industry preferred males is down 29% or something like that. But the other 3 are all sort of— they were already there.

If you have a big increase in females, obviously the sex ratio is going to get skewed. So I'm just saying we're kind of where we were last year. Tier 4, the calculation is the same. So is it really just point 1 that kind of drove the discussion?

Through the chair, Dana, I I think I will say that last year, uh, the CPT recommendation was not Tier 4. That was what the SSA— so I feel like this is our interpretation of potentially where— when we went back and looked at the SSC minutes, it was like the average of the last 5 years, and we just felt like maybe it needed to be more than that. And the value value of, you know, 40 over 50 is arbitrary. Um, I think that the sex skewed sex ratio was a little bit— is more apparent this year. I don't think it was as present last year, so that was an increase in our mind.

Um, but some of the other things here are— have— were persistent, but without— they were— there wasn't a list of these for last last year. So when we started putting them together, we're like, this seems like it would— might be more concern this year than there was last year. But, um, I think we're offering this as a place to start. You guys can do what you want with it.

Martin. Thanks. Yeah, I guess just in terms of the biomass trend, it's a little— I mean, there was a decline from last year in that exploitable component, but if you look at it over the last 4, I mean, it's not good news, but the estimate for 2026 is more or less the same as it was in 2024. Those are higher than it was, a little bit higher than they were in 2020 or 2022 and '23. So, I mean, the abundance has been more or less flat.

It's not getting better, but, you know, it's still— it's like whether— I mean, this is not a good news story, but whether it's getting worse, I think it's an open question. And I guess maybe on the bright side, you know, the fact that the clutch fullness was just like, at some point that ratio, does it really mean something? I mean, there's no way that one mature male crab is going to successfully mate with 85. I mean, I don't think that's in the books. And so there's obviously some mating going on, and granted, it could be the hybrids that are are doing it, but also it sort of makes sense that maybe those males that aren't— I'm kind of— I should get to a question here.

I'm just, uh, that they're, that they're reproductively active in the absence of large males. So I'm just wondering about the sort of idea that there is an increased concern over last year?

Through the Chair, I think I'm trying to track what your question is, just on increased concern. I think that, um, it's, it's hard to know how much the, the skewed ratio for males and females, um, like you said, they're still showing that they're reproduce— they're producing clutches, um, how much of that is hybrid how much of that is hybridization between snow crab females and Tanner crab males. I think that— I will say that the CPT, I feel like, has not only the number of large males, but the number of large male— the number of newly molted crab that are molting into those large male sizes, I think, is of increasing concern. Concern. And I think that was what the CPT wanted to note with our potential increased buffer in addition to these other things that may have been present last year also.

Sorry, I think the, that 3% is also, 3.5% is also terrible, but I don't think it's worse than last last year. Maybe it's a little worse.

Through the Chair, Martin, I don't have last year's in front of me right now, so I couldn't reflect. I just feel like the conversation did focus around it being somewhat worse than last year, but I might have to go back and look and see.

Next question from Chris sitting online. Yeah, thanks, Katie. I, I wasn't paying attention and I hoping you might remember. Do you remember, were the females generally more or less evenly distributed across the survey, or were there any hotspot tows that really dominated this skewed ratio? Thanks.

Through the chair, Chris, I'm just Pulling up the survey map from Emily for mature females. I don't recall any mention of hotspot tows. There are, looks like there is some large, bigger hotspot areas than there were previous year, but I don't recall any mention from the survey folks of it being due, like that increase in mature females being due to like just one toe. Um, but it's just looking at the, the kind of maps that Emily produced, I think this is— oh, I don't know which slide, um, on our presentation. I can go back and look at that for you.

But, um, there, there did seem to be potentially some hotspots there. It's hard to know, um, without having the survey report in front of me how many toes the overall and how prevalent those are. I'd have to go back and kind kind of confer with Emily on that.

Yeah. Okay, thanks.

Okay, I'm not seeing any further questions. I'm just going to check and see.

We have one, uh, sign up for public testimony, so I think we'll go to public testimony next.

And that will be Mr. Scott Goodman. Welcome back, Scott.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Scott Goodman again for BSFRF. I wanted to just take a moment and add a couple of things. I definitely appreciate the ongoing discussion here. So these comments are around snow crab type hybrids.

I think in terms of a workshop, my thoughts, without trying to say here's how to do it exactly, would be that BSFRF and the industry would be very willing to either lead or help lead it. I think it would be a pretty high priority point for the industry to get some more help in figuring out the different issues, layers, identifying some things and brainstorming some things. As a point to make that's very related to this, our MSE for snow crab, which is ongoing, just recently had an industry ad hoc stakeholder meeting to form up the ad hoc advisory group, which was a pretty large group of people. Intended to just be an introduction for the snow crab MSE, and the meeting was about an hour, and about 30 minutes of it was talking about hybrids. So the issue is very relevant and very high priority for the industry to try to find the right path forward, and I just wanted to make that note that we would be willing to either lead or help lead it.

Um, secondly, I didn't say anything about our recent OPS1 project that we just completed, I did want to just mention a couple of very brief things about it. Um, it's not really summarized in a form where we have information shareable, but, um, in general, we saw a fair amount of hybrids. Um, we saw some sex ratio disparity between the two sampling gears, so there will be some information that we will report as we pull the details together there that'll be relevant both for snow crab and for hybrids. A quick note on the survey itself, in retrospect, I think as we were trying to figure out exactly what we could do and where we could go, one thing that we did not do was go overlap with the area that held commercial-sized Tanner crab, commercial-sized snow crab, and.

Commercial-sized hybrids. So our study design and spatial coverage was developed before. We could have changed on the fly, but we did not do so to cover that area, unfortunately. Having said that, it's— I think everybody thinks it's likely that the Bairdi, Tanner snow crab, and hybrid issues will persist. That'll very likely be a point of inclusion in next year's version of this work.

So that's, that's all. Thank you.

Sure. Sure. Thanks for testifying, Scott. Um, when you talked about, um, when you talked about the workshop, um, you mentioned issues and layers. What would the goal of the workshop be?

From your perspective?

Thank you for the question through the chair. Um, I think the goal of the workshop would be to determine what layers have answers and what don't, and is there something different that we don't quite have right now, um, that is a viable option. So there's lots of those things. I, I think you guys have volleyed these around. There's biological questions, there's regulatory questions, there's economic questions, there's crab rationalization program questions.

You have two species that are identified as quota that are hybridizing to produce a crab that's not quota. There's a regulation that says that the hybrid is to be counted this way. So I think the layers I would be curious about in a workshop, which would take some brainstorming, and I think are similar to some of the things that were talked about in the recent meeting I referenced, are It, like, it didn't quite work as an add-on to SnowCrab, so is there a better way? That, to give you an idea. But I think the hope would be that as a commercial resource that's sitting out there, that there's some way that is a solvable solution to access that without doing something that's bad.

Thank you very much.

Okay, thanks for your testimony. Just double checking. Yep, that's it for public testimony. So we'll now move into our discussion, and we'll start with Chris Sidden.

Thank you, Ian. Let's see how we go here. So first, I want to just thank the assessment authors and the ESP authors and the plan team for all their work and their review on this. Thank folks that provided written and public testimony. I will touch on that kind of as we go, kind of some of the topics that they hit as well, just for simplicity's sake.

I think the, the real nuts and bolts of this are relatively straightforward. Overfishing is not occurring for snow crab and the stock is above the minimum stock size threshold, so it is not overfished.

Um, but just to be clear, it will remain under a rebuilding plan, um, until it has rebuilt to the BMS of Y level. Um, just so that's clear. Um, we— I agree with the author and the CPT recommendation of a RIMA smoother slash Tier 4 approach, um, with the corresponding OFL of 21.22 kilotons. The CPT recommended applying a 50% buffer, and I will just— we had some conversation on that, and I just want to— I'm going to provide a very quick history just to get us all on the same speed, on the same playing field there. Prior to 2020, it was a 20% buffer.

In 2021, it was a 25% buffer due to not having a survey that year. 2022 Was a 25% buffer. We had survey data, but we had model convergence issues. 2023 Was a 50% buffer with a high F and maturity concerns. 2024 Was 65% buffer, similar concerns as 2023, but a little more so.

Last year in 2025, we moved from accepting Tier 3 size-structured models, um, and went to the Tier 4 RMA approach and applied a 40% buffer. So there weren't any convergence issues, but there was still serious maturity concerns that remained. In 2026, we heard some— this conversation about some additional concerns about the 3.5% of terminal molting males.

We, about low recruitment, about the sex ratio is highly skewed, the morphometric mature biomass is used, that one is I think pretty reasonable that that happened as last year as part of the 40%, and then the last one that they used that had for a rationale was not accounting for natural mortality between survey and fishery timing in producing those estimates, the OFL calculation. I'm a little on the fence. I think they noted some real increased concerns over last year, so I think part of me says I concur with the 50% buffer to designate that that's the case. Certainly we heard some discussion already that folks are can buy that more or less. I guess the bigger thing for me, one of the bigger things is the, you know, the 85:1 ratio is super amazing from a biological standpoint, if that's real.

And then the other part of me and why I asked the question of Katie, and I just looked at the snow crab mature female heat maps, And it looks like there's one toe and maybe a second toe that dominate the, where the female, mature females came from. So again, I'm a little, I generally just have some concern about survey modernization and the survey and how it's tracking accurate, accurately the population. So either we have a super cued super skewed female, like, unprecedented, I'll say, um, sex ratio, or we have a sampling artifact that we need to be cognizant of. So either one of those things I think is fairly, um, significant in the grand scheme of things, in addition to the other things that the plan team suggests. So I will As a starting point, and we will certainly have a discussion, I would recommend that we stick with the plan team's recommended 50% buffer for that.

Moving on from that, so you guys can stew on that for a little bit here.

Um, I would also recommend that the RIMA approach have an actual model number since that was our preferred model last year and we should start next year with a model number, and I think reasonably so, 25.0 might be a good place to start. Those of you that have the process and model numbering, you could add your two cents to that, but it seems like this is our preferred model from last year. We should have it numbered accordingly so we can stop calling it the fallback model. It's just awkward at best.

So that's a recommendation from me.

I have a few comments on the size-structured model that were presented. I'm encouraged by the, the authors' attempt to simplify the size-structured model using data from prior to the collapse in the male-only attempt, but I would reiterate the SSC's intent over the past 6 years to significantly simplify the snow crab assessment and then thoughtfully add complexity to improve model stability and to learn where those main issues actually arise. I think this is the first good step. I think there's lots to be done still. The CPT recommended focusing on a simplified male-only model with stepwise addition of parameter estimation.

I think this is all good. This is great. My recommendation here is that the author just go back and review all of the previous CPT and SSC minutes and of the Simpler Modeling Workshop notes and bring a measured logical approach to the CLABM modeling workshop in May and in the plan team. I think there are significant and appropriate recommendations in all of those things that we don't need to add new recommendations for what they're doing. I think our intent has been clear from the onset set in 2021 that we're looking for a simple approach and to break this down and then step, step it up as we go.

This recommendation on simpler modeling is even more important in the context of the high hybrid abundances in the past 2 years. We really are going to need a functional and stable snow crab model if we have any chance to incorporate hybrids in the future in any real fashion. So I think this is a super high priority to get moving forward. I would reiterate here public testimony from Scott Goodman regarding the frustration and the confusion with the snow crab assessment over the past 5+ years. This has been ongoing.

And this will lead now into another focus on the REMA/Tier 4 approach that we have now currently, I think we will currently accept for the Latinx these last year and this year. It was brought up that it doesn't account for mortality between the survey and the fishery, and this is non-trivial, it's about 5 months of that. Other Tier 4 crab stocks do account for this, so we should really contemplate whether that's that we want to do this. And while we, the SSC, have been pretty explicit about not doing this for simplicity of the fallback model, I propose that we recommend accounting for this mortality for snow crab, at least. I just don't see this as a fallback model anymore, at least in the near future, and I think we should really try to do that some justice.

We should also we might consider that for all the Tier 4 models. So even the, the RIMA Tier 4 for Tanner crab and Bristol Bay red crab, just to be consistent and more accurate for what we know.

Tier 4 in general, we also was brought up, Katie brought up what years to include for the BMSY proxy estimate. Some Tier 4 stocks use all the years, some use a subset of the years.

The CPT suggested that we should include only years where fishing actually occurred, so there might be a consistent rationale across stocks for all those RIMA Tier 4 methods, the fallback for Tanner and Bristol Bay as well. And so I would recommend reviewing the rationale for the years chosen for BMSY proxies for all stocks. Snow crab explicitly here and examine differences between using all years and only years where directed fishing occurred and provide a consistent recommendation across stocks.

The last point I'll make on the REMA approach is that if you read the Tier 4 harvest control rules in the crab FMP, it doesn't really fit in that, there's the, the Tier 4 description talks about population dynamics and incorporating those, and the smoother of RIMA doesn't really fit into a Tier 4. It's just a little awkward, and it really to me reiterates that the importance of revising and editing the HCRs should be a pretty high priority for crab, and we should get to that in the near future. And again, this kind of goes, I'm bleeding over into the Tanner crab stuff, but the CIE review Oso recommended, you know, looking into harvest control rules. So this is just another iteration of there are things to be done to make some notable improvements here.

Last, I won't dwell on hybrids, but really just to reiterate that a size-structured model for snow crab that is functional and stable and simple is really going to be essential for us to move forward to try to incorporate hybrids, likely. Um, and I do support some kind of group effort to put our heads together and come up with a plan to move forward with this. Um, and that will be, um, where we SSE members can provide our expertise from the science side of things, but recognizing that this is bigger than just a science, um, that some management and policy, um, thoughtfulness needs to be integrated with that. I'll stop there. I think that covers most of my main comments, and I'll let Jason add some things.

Thank you. Thanks, Chris. Jason.

Yeah, thanks, Chris, for the comprehensive overview. I think I'm in agreement with most of what you've said, except perhaps a couple points here, and one being the buffer. I think you had recommended 50%. I was inclined to recommend 40%, which was our previous buffer, given that I think most of the uncertainty is related to the smaller males and their contribution to production. And I also noted that, you know, that also reflected that level 2 ranking in the risk table.

So I think this has just been an ongoing issue, and I guess I didn't see— I saw the female situation as an interesting curiosity this year. It was maybe more than a curiosity in the sense that I couldn't really distinguish if it was a kind of an outlier event or if we're dealing with something that's more long-term.

I had not really thought that that would warrant the extra 10%. Let's see, I'm just going through my notes because you covered a lot of stuff.

I just want to pass on the CPT recommendation for continued work on the Tier 3 model and focused on simplifying the Tier 3 assessment. To males only. I think that makes sense. It certainly is consistent with past SSC recommendations to start with a simpler model and building up. So, um, certainly in supportive of that, um, supportive in the new model numbering, um, for the fallback, which was I think, um, 25.0, but, um, I'm not 100% sure that's the right number.

But anyways, when they bring it forward next time, it'd be good to have a Tier 4 number with that. Um, I also supported your recommendation about, um, the BMSY proxy estimate and sort of looking across stocks to figure out what's appropriate and bringing that back to the SSC. So that's not for this assessment but for future. And then most of my comments now are really focused on the hybrid issue.

I was trying to think of some way to sort of frame this a little differently in the sense of whether the hybrids require conservation and management. So maybe more in tune to how stocks are viewed in or out of an FMP. So I think the SSC, we should note in our minutes, whether hybrids should require conservation management, conservation under the FMP has not been evaluated. I think it's good for our minutes to note that. And also that, as noted by the CPT, the current management does not include hybrids in setting the ABCOFL for snow crab.

And obviously they're not in the FMP. I think future work on whether the hybrids require conservation management would be a useful sort of starting point, a framework to discuss the types of information required relative to the hybrids needing specifications. This might provide sort of a reference point on the types of data that could be applied and whether it is available.

To sort of meet that criteria.

I think, you know, I like the idea of the goal of a workshop, and I think we heard lots of public testimony, which I appreciated, um, particularly sort of on the goal. And one of the goals was to sort of get everybody in the room to have a discussion, but I feel like before that happens, sort of maybe having some framing of, you know, the, how should I put this? Some framing of the conservation and management issues might sort of help going into that workshop, if there were to be a workshop. But I don't have a mechanism for launching a workshop. So maybe others here have some ideas on sort of, how to move this forward.

Or maybe, you know, another approach would be just not make that decision here and just note to the council that, you know, we haven't had this evaluation. It's something to consider. And, um, you know, that might be a way forward.

Um, and that's pretty much what I have.

Thanks, Jason.

I had one clarification, perhaps it's to Chris or both of you. There was a recommendation to account for the mortality between the survey and the fishery. And when we heard this described from Katie, she also noted that there's a discrepancy in the treatment of molting and growth during that time period as well. And I, so I just wanted to pose the question, are we separating off purely mortality? Or are we asking for an evaluation of factors that occur between the survey and the fishery that need to be accounted for in general?

Yeah, thanks, Ian. I think the mortality was the most obvious thing, but I think when Katie pointed growth and molting out, that if we're going to do this correct, if we're going to stay simple, we just ignore all of it, and if we're going to do this, we should probably do all three of those things. Right, to be as clean as possible. So we can add that to the recommendation to add, to contemplate, or to look at growth and molting in addition to mortality.

And so I think as a follow-up, my question to the group is, where do we stand on just staying simple versus doing something that's now kind of edging toward an actual population dynamics model.

And Sherry, I saw your hand if you want to comment on this or this and more. Go ahead.

Sure. I guess one question where— one question that I do have is that we've really— there's a lot of things that haven't been consistent, but we have been consistent in trying to keep this simple ever since I think 2021, the Simpler Modeling Workshop. And it was really meant as a method that is easy to calculate, won't add any time to an author's plate, so that if for some reason their Tier 3 model didn't converge and we figured that out like at an SSC meeting, that there was some number that we could go back to. I think that was the original impetus for this, and so there was really a push to keep it simple. Um, I do agree with Chris that, you know, if we're moving on our third year of doing it, it no longer is a fallback.

I mean, it's the one model. And so I guess my question though is, I do wonder, instead of changing the process, is having a fallback still as a very simple, hopefully not very time-consuming number there in case of emergencies, keep that, but is this a case of at this point looking for a different type of assessment to do with snow crab, like a tier for assessment or something else where we could actually— I realize this isn't— October is not the time that we make model recommendations, but I do wonder, you know, if we know that we're having trouble with convergence and it's lasted for more than a year, is this a time possibly to look at a different tier? And so I was trying to separate, do we need to change the fallback, or can we keep the fallback process and work within our tier system, um, for a next assessment.

Martin? Yeah, I guess I'm just worried a bit about, you know, the SSC swerving in the sense that, um, remember us telling the snow crab author to— who had done all these things— to take them out because we wanted a simpler approach. And so, um, I think that's a bit of a concern. I mean, I guess I'm not, um, I mean, we are making a pretty large approximation with the Tier 4 approach, and trying to polish it is still, yeah, I want to use the term lipstick on a pig if I can, but it's kind of, it's, it's You know, and I don't think we've ever done that for groundfish. I mean, it's always just been the survey biomass times M. And so we haven't— we understand that, you know, the timing is different for crab, and there is a seasonality that we don't pay attention to for groundfish.

But the thought, I think, is that it's recommending such a low mortality that this kind of approximation is probably, you know, that's, that's what it is and it's probably okay. So I guess I'm sort of arguing that we just keep, you know, prioritize keeping it simple as being sort of consistent with our previous guidance and, you know, how we've treated these kinds of assessments in the past.

Curry. Yeah, I think I would concur. I mean, that the whole goal is to have something as simple as possible, um, given that that's the new basis for snow crab moving forward. If the authors believe that the mortality incurred between the survey and the start of the fishery is, is very important to consider, this would be a new model variant that they could consider. It's not the fallback model, but it would be a new model that's put forward, evaluated, and considered.

I want to give— go ahead, Dana, you first. I just want to be a little careful with what Kerry just said there, because once you say, well, you can keep adding some extensions to that, we'll have a very complicated Tier 4 model. Where maybe their focus should be on a simple Tier 3 model. So my vote is for keep it simple.

Thanks, Dana. Chris, I see you got your hand up. Go ahead. Yeah, thanks. Yeah, I don't know the answer to this.

I think I like Kerry's thought process though, right? It's like the fallback is the fallback, right? We wanted it to be simple for everybody. We don't need to add new things to the other stocks that seem to have relatively stable Tier 3 size structure models. I mean, that's really just for the one-offs.

I do have concerns, like if we're 4 or 5 more years into this and we're just doing this for snow crab, that seems like we're not doing justice to what we— we have more information and we should be utilizing it. So I think, you know, again, I don't know how to best do that, but it would be a new model construct and then you know, the fallback for snow crab is what it is, and then we could in fact recommend bringing mortality and growth and maturity back for snow crab only, right, as a build, and then the plan team can either decide to recommend that approach or not on the next go-around.

Martin. I think the new assessment author for snow crab has every intent of bringing forward a Tier 3 model next cycle. So, you know, maybe that's a consideration and that we would be asking for some additional modeling work that would sort of detract from that effort. Which I think is— agree that it's the most important thing that we want to concentrate assessment work on.

Jason.

Yeah, I just want to follow. I, I agree with Martin. I mean, I, I think the author's already got intention to bring it forward for the modeling workshop, the Tier 3, and I think You know, I think that's been our goal to get a Tier 3 model, so I would certainly wouldn't want to detract from progress on that.

Okay, we, we still have some discussion to be had. I think we have two proposals for buffers floating out there, 50% and 40%. So I'd like to hear from some other SSC members. And maybe from Jason and Chris again, see if we can figure out where we stand on those two.

Martin. Yeah, I, I guess I think Jason articulate, you know, indicated preference for keeping the buffer the same and, and I don't think there's any, just looking over the data, the, that very low proportion of crab that are maturing into the exploitable component of the stock is, it's the same as it was last year and close to what it was the year before. So that situation, while bad, is not new. And the issue with respect to the nat— natural mortality occurring after the survey, I mean, that was that occurred last year. It wasn't maybe thought about or worried about last year, but it was still, um, the same issue was there.

So I guess I'm, I'm thinking that we're— we should just try to avoid them sort of, um, ramping up a buffer when there's really no elevated concerns this year. I mean, I mean, I guess maybe the one argument would be that things are not getting better, and we had sort of anticipated that snow crab would— status would be improving, and it didn't happen this year. And so it's really not clear whether it's going to happen in the future. So maybe that's That's it. That would be a consideration, but that wasn't articulated by the planning team that we could articulate it.

All right, I think leaving things at the current buffer is appropriate.

Dana. Yeah, I would support the 40% buffer as well for the reasons that were articulated. I would also point out that, you know, we are in a Tier 4 situation, which is like half of what the Tier 3 models were saying.

ABC should be as well. Not that we believe them.

Loop back and give you an opportunity, Chris, to tell us if you're comfortable with the shift to 40%. Yeah, thanks, Ian. I'm okay with the shift to 40%. I think we just wanted to make sure to articulate the additional plan team concerns, and I think we have here. I think folks have also articulated why those may not warrant a 10% increase in the buffer, and that's totally fine.

I think we'll just keep that tracking as we move forward into the future, and that's fine.

Yeah, I think that's totally, totally fine.

Thanks. Thanks, Chris. Last call for discussion points.

Rob.

Yeah, I just wanted to follow up with a couple of back to hybrids as far as at least my perspective on the summary of direction. I fully agree with Katie's perspective on the workshop needing to be separate from January for all the reasons you mentioned, especially expertise in the room. Um, I think there could be just two kind of overarching objectives, um, in terms of just identifying what biological information, um, ecological information, demographic information is needed to make the decision of whether they— if they are going to be modeled with one of the current assessments, whether they should be included in the snow crab or the Tanner crab. I don't think we should go into that with a prior expectation that it's— they must— they should be modeled with snow crab until we know more. And then the second overarching objective is, is it feasible to have a directed fishery on them and what, what that would take?

Or if it's the current situation is sort of the best we could do, and maybe if additional TAC is added, it should be added to both snow crab or tenor crab. Because I guess those are just some of the, I guess, the priority of, I guess, objectives that I would think we need to go into. And then they could be more detailed than that, but I suspect the biology, ecology, demography questions that we would need to answer are going to take years to sort out. So I think anyways, I was just thinking those are the two main directions that, that workshop could start off with answering questions.

Jason.

Yeah, just a kind of a point of clarification maybe to Rob. I mean, when I was speaking to conservation management, I was speaking specifically to criteria in the national standards, and so there's a long list there. Of those sort of things that you're talking about in terms of biology and that type of information. So I just wanted to sort of put that out there just to note that I think they're complementary.

Sherri.

So I appreciate those suggestions from both Jason and Rob. I, uh, just a second, I'm trying to get back to my notes.

Um, yes, it, um, I, I hadn't heard people speak to specifically whether or not— was trying to figure out sort of what the goal of this was. If— and I am, I'm with you, Rob, that I think that identifying biological, ecological, demographic reasons of whether they should be included in SNOW or Tanner Yep, I think that fully falls within our purview because our goal is to set OFLs and ABCs that are appropriate, and if for some reason all the hybrids should be included somewhere and they're not, that falls within doing our job as required under Magnuson-Stevens Act. Um, this second part— I'm starting with Rob's, but I'm getting to yours, Jason— is You know, is it feasible to have a directed fishery? In order to have a directed fishery, I believe you need to be in the FMP, and I don't believe that it— and it is not the SSC's call as to whether or not that's in the FMP. So I think that that is outside of our purview.

And as far as if TAC is added, where it is added, and which species it's added to, that also, that is ADFNG's purview, but because of the definitions of crab— EDF&G is limited by policy that it needs to be snow crab if it is added. So I think that those are outside of our realm. I always appreciate Jason's views on things because the wording that you took really addresses if things are needed in conservation, if a stock is— the SSC's role is looking at conservation and highlighting what the question— and I don't have Jason's words— but whether or not the population needs— whether it has been— it has not been looked at whether that population needs to be conserved. That's a question, and I think it raises it to the council level within guidelines, and I think within our role. So I actually appreciated Jason's phrasing and the way that you, that you thought about that.

As far as a workshop, I think that, I think the goal is really key. And if that, so yes, there's a difference between a work, working group, which is sort of an agency and possibly CPT or SSC members, and a workshop, which often includes public and outside entities. And that can only be recommended by the council, and in order for them to do it, we would need to ask for it, tell them why we think it needs— what parties we think would be valuable to be involved, um, and why, and then also say what the goal of that workshop is, which is why I was asking, because I think that looking for ways to harvest hybrids— while I am completely there in our world of not— of having other stocks declining. I'm there with my heart, but I'm not sure that— I don't believe that that's within something that we can ask for a workshop on is how can we harvest hybrids. But I think we can do, if people want to look at biological ecological other things, and/or if you— if we just want to look at the different data streams and look more into identification, or if we wanted to look into what is the error in certain data streams, all of those fall into our purview as doing the OFLs and ABCs for Tanner and Snow.

Um, so anyway, those are just my thoughts on, on purviews, I guess.

You know, I support Jason's idea of asking, you know, just raising, raising the issue on, you know, whether hybrids need conservation. I think that that's an approach we could take if, and then if we wanted to do the workshop, the question is, do people have an interest in a workshop that is looking at it within the lens that the SSC would sort of need to recommend. And maybe other people are creative and can think of other ideas or other goals, but that's, that's sort of where I've been stumped so far, is that if it's how can we harvest more, I don't think that's an SSC recommendation. How to get there.

Chris.

I appreciate this discussion because one of the things that I really love about fisheries is that it creates all these situations that I could not possibly imagine sitting in my office.

So I think if I were to try to come up with another, with an alternative goal that's, that's based in sort of our charge, I would phrase it in terms of optimum yield instead of conservation.

And I think if the way that we're approaching these now is that they're not included in contrib— in the models as contributing to biomass of Tanner crab, reproductive power of the Tanner crab stock, and they're not included in contributing to the reproductive power of the snow crab stock, then they're— and they aren't really a species. Like, I don't even know how you include something that isn't a species in the FMP. I I, I've— this, it strikes me as far enough outside anything that's been conceived that they're— we're probably trying to put a round peg— a square peg in a round hole, um, to, to make current regulation deal with this in a, in an elegant way, but it almost seems like the sort of thing that isn't regulated as a target. There might be other reasons that we'd want to limit effort on it, but if it's not, if it's not contributing to the reproductive power of either our, our Tanner crab or our snow crab, then as a thought exercise, Why wouldn't we just go catch it?

And that might be one of the things that the models are telling us. If it doesn't matter that we add this biomass to the reproductive stock of either of these things, then maybe it's not doing anything.

Now, I'm literally posing that as a scientific question. I don't know. But in terms of distinguishing what the workshop can do to work our fisheries toward optimum yield, I think answering— it's sort of distinguishing the scientifically interesting questions from those that actually are conservation concerns would be a— for the identified species that we have and we manage, that would be a useful distinction.

Martin.

Thanks, Chris. I mean, I'm actually thinking about some of the examples that you mentioned, and it seems like maybe framing it as sort of sort of alternative sort of ways of thinking about it is managing for eradication, essentially, or, you know, full unconstrained usage versus managing for yield as sort of two options that are sort of on the table right now. And it's not clear which one is, is the the appropriate approach. And so that's kind of where we're at. And but it does seem like that those are the two alternative ways to think about it, either that they're something that we don't need in the system and that they're entirely available for people to remove, or there's something we want to manage towards some kind of— in some kind of sustainable way.

I have Sherri next and then Franz.

Yeah, we might need, um, I think part of the struggle that I'm having is when we, when we're talking about managing and we're talking about optimum yield, I think both of those terms are talked within the Magnuson-Stevens Act about fish or fisheries that are established in an FMP and were outside of that.

So I just, I, there's, you know, until I'm struggling a bit, but, you know, until that is changed or that is addressed by in the purview of a group that is able to do that. I'm having a— I'm struggling trying to figure out how to do it when I'm not even sure that those are questions. When I'm trying to think of our charge, I'm not sure that that's within it, at least not yet. I'm— we can raise issues for sure.

France. Uh, yeah, thanks. Um, I'm afraid we're kind of overthinking that here. I don't think we're gonna— feels like we're starting to kind of get into the workshop. Um, indeed, if there is to be one.

Um, when I, when I raised it earlier, whether you want to comment on that, I mean, I was really just thinking, I mean, that council is going to, um, get public testimony asking for a workshop probably, and I I think we can certainly just note in our report that there's kind of a number of interrelated issues that ranges from the, you know, biology of the hybrids, from how to kind of monitor and sort out the different data streams, how to deal with them in the assessment, and then of course, you know, how to consider them in management with our conservation concerns and all kinds of things. And that could certainly benefit from, you know, having the scientific expertise, fisheries participants, and managers in the room.

And maybe we can just leave it at that. And if we are willing to support that kind of effort, we should We should note that, um, uh, that if there, you know, were some forum to discuss these things, whether we have the capacity, um, you know, that's a whole nother question.

Kayla.

Yeah, I might just add, I think generally we would expect, or you would think, that there would be social and economic information that would go forward in at this stage to inform the council's decision-making. And so it wouldn't be us deciding optimal yield, or Franz, just to add maybe one other step to what you were saying, that we— that there might be consideration of what social and economic information, uh, the council would want to see, which probably is more of maybe than is available and has been presented right now, and that, that would be something that the SSC might review. So I think that's within the SSC's purview, not to say what optimal yield is, but the kind of step before, which is we haven't seen really anything on the implications of, um, the, um, sort of process in place right now from a social or economic perspective, I don't think.

I feel like we're starting to coalesce a little bit on here. Um, what I'm not hearing clearly is whether we are going to support an action on this or note that if an action is initiated by the Council, this is what— these are some things we think should probably be included, and these are the types of participants. And that may not be terribly important in terms of the way we're thinking about it, but when we present it to the Council, that's a very clear turning point of whether we're recommending a workshop or whether we're recommending that if the Council decides to have a workshop Here's some things they may want to consider. So I'm open to some thoughts on that as to how we'd like to phrase that.

Rob?

Yeah, thanks, Evan, for kind of refining what we're thinking here, the two options, and I always appreciate Sherry, keeping my and other comments in context, what we can really focus on. I guess I was thinking more broadly from a council's perspective and what we need, and from Fish and Game's perspective, what we need to know collectively to help make some of these decisions. But I would, I guess I'm in favor of the latter of your decision, or what you proposed, is that we provide recommendations should this is what we would like to see included should a workshop or something similar be recommended.

Franz? Yeah, I would agree with that, um, the latter approach that, you know, I don't know what the best way is. You know, we can keep, um, you know, dealing with that and through the usual annual process and discussions. But if the council chooses to kind of expedite that, then, you know, we're, uh, you know, we can say whether we're willing to support that, or we can point out some of the considerations around the monitoring and assessment and, and, you know, any other issues that the SSC, you know, can contribute to.

Sherri?

Sure, and I'm with you as well. I think that the, you know, what Franz described about supporting an effort and your summary as well, I think that, I mean, Clearly, we— I think that there is expertise that we have that can contribute to conversations like these. Um, so I too would support, you know, if— I think that we can even say, you know, the SSE had a wide-ranging discussion about hybrids and, um, concerns, data streams to the current models. And, you know, and stop short of recommending a workshop with a particular goal. But if the Council, you know, wishes to move forward with some effort, the SSC is willing to participate or something like that.

I have a hard time telling them what things to consider when I don't know what their goal will be. So I, I'll be a little— I feel a little bit out over my skis to suggest things for purpose that I'm not certain what they're gonna go for, but at least noting that we've certainly had concerns and thoughts, um, sometimes makes a difference. Oops, sorry, I'm not—. Curry. Yeah, I think that's fine with me.

I wonder if we might consider articulating some of these as core questions, uh, related to data, related to the procedural process, related to kind of the disconnect between treating them as part of snow crab catch, but not part of the snow crab index. Maybe we can just sort of highlight these points that are important for consideration, so they're captured from some of our wide-ranging discussions, but hopefully form the basis if a workshop is convened.

Excellent, thanks.

Um, okay.

I think I'm willing to try to summarize where we are. Thanks everybody for a good discussion on that. Um, so to wrap up snow crab, we're going to note the public testimony received. We are going to note that the stock is not overfished. Overfishing did not occur.

However, it is not yet rebuilt and will remain under a rebuilding plan. We will support the REMA smoother of morphologically mature male biomass as the preferred model, again, for this year. We will note that we had some discussion over the buffer and will highlight some of the issues that are included both in last year's buffer consideration and in this year's buffer consideration, and that we settled on a 40% buffer from the model up from the maximum permissible ABC due to ongoing issues and similar conditions as observed last year. Um, we'll however note that the conditions aren't— don't seem to be improving. We're going to recommend that the authors give the REMA model a number, likely 25.0, and included in the formal model numbering going forward.

We are going to put strong emphasis on further development of the size-structured Tier 3 model and attempts to significantly simplify that model. We'll recommend that the authors, as we have in the past, start small, find something that converges, and work back up in complexity. Uh, we'll recommend that they review previous crab and scallop plan team SS— and SSC minutes, um, as we have had many relevant recommendations since 2021. We'll note that not only is this important for the snow crab analysis, but that we need a functional and stable model to deal with some of these questions that have come up as a function of the, of hybrid crab.

We will acknowledge that we had some discussion about the REMA approach and some of the shortcomings of the level of simplicity we've asked for, namely not including mortality, growth, and molding. Between the time that the survey is conducted and the time that the fishery is conducted, but at present, we will recommend that the authors maintain the simple RIMA approach as we've had it applied to, also to Tanner and Bristol Bay red king crab. And although we recognize that there could be some development in, in that model on its own, or perhaps toward a Tier 4 model, we will prioritize the development of the Tier 3 model over that at present time. We will recommend to the crab and scallop plan team that they consider the reference years to include in the RMA and in general across reference points, um, and to compare the rationale across stocks and look at differences and not, not isolating this discussion just to snow crab.

We will also note that the Tier 4 harvest control rule in the crab FMP doesn't really fit what we're doing with the REMA approach, or is not a great match, and that we support all efforts to review and consider the harvest control rules that are in the crab FMP.

We will note that we had a wide-ranging discussion about hybrids, data streams, and current models, and how these things interact. We will note that the question of whether hybrids require conservation and management based on national standards has not yet been determined, and we find this to be a pretty fundamental turning point in what we can and cannot do at the— at this point. We will suggest that should a workshop of some sort go forward, um, we will support— we, we have several recommendations for things that could be considered as part of such a workshop. Those would include specifically what biological information is needed to make the decision that hybrids would be managed as snow, tanner, or perhaps separately. What social and economic information or other information is needed to evaluate harvest and the potential for optimum yield.

We will recommend that the expert expertise needed for such a workshop would have to include a range of different individuals representing scientists, managers, and harvesters, and that the SSC is willing to participate if that effort goes forward. And hopefully we will be very creative in our minute writing and pose some of these issues that we have identified as questions that really emphasize the, the gaps in our current understanding.

I think that's what we've got.

Our best laid plans were to finish crab today. It's not looking good for finishing crab today. So I want to confirm with Katie that she will be willing to come back in the morning. Thanks, Katie. We appreciate it.

So with that, we're going to close for the day, and we will start tomorrow on our easy crab stocks, namely St. Matthew Blue King Crab, um, and the rest of our agenda. Don't forget dinner tonight at 6:30. Closed for the day. Thanks.