Vol. 53 - Alaska Resources Library and Information Services

consequences of oil exposure scenarios are discussed in Section 8.0).
In this section, data have been summarized that pertain to the general
biology and ecology of larval king crab, primarily P. camtschatica.
Information gained from data of 1976-1981 is fragmentary and a story of
larval biology is far from complete. Opportunistic work in 1982 and
OCSEAP programs along the NAS in 1983 have and will greatly contribute
to a backdrop of biological information against which oil impact
scenarios can be cast and analyzed.
With the data gathered in this
study, a sense of the spatial and temporal susceptibility of red king
crab larvae to oil has been gained.
The ultimate effects of oil perturbations would be to reduce
year-class (es) strength and, in turn, reduce the number of animals
entering the fishery.
Year-class strength is highly variable as
evidenced by the tenfold decline in legal males between 1979 and 1982
(Fig. 3.5), and a decrease from 150 million mature females in 1977 to 55
million in 1982 (Otto et al. 1982).
determined by some combination of:
Year-class strength is probably
1) reproductive success of the mature
female population; 2) survivorship of larvae and; 3) survivorship of
young benthic juveniles for one to two years after metamorphosis.
A suite of biotic and abiotic factors (e.g. temperature, currents,
food, refuge habitat, predators) act in optimal or perturbational
combinations on these three life-history links to produce changes in
abundance.
Even the fishery itself may exacerbate the effects of
suboptimal conditions influencing reproductive effort and survivorship
of environmentally sensitive life-history stages.
Important points to
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