At midnight Monday, California closed its springtime Dungeness crab fishing season coastwide, three months early. Hundreds of California crab fishermen and fisherwomen who rely on this fishery to feed their families will be off the water. They will have to find work elsewhere. Some may lose their livelihoods.

The order to close the spring fishery was made by the state Department of Fish and Wildlife, in part to prevent whales listed under the federal Endangered Species Act from becoming entangled in the ropes and buoys fishermen use to mark and retrieve their crab traps from the ocean floor. The decision was also made to fulfill the terms of a legal settlement in an aggressive lawsuit brought against the department.

Future crab fishing seasons will open, including in the fall of this year, but state officials and crab fishermen are now operating in a brave new world, using sweeping fishery management approaches based on new scientific tools for the first time. If the crab fishing industry is going to survive these changes and continue to provide you and your family with California crabs, our fishing families need your support.

California’s Dungeness crab fishing industry is made up of several hundred small fishing businesses and their crews in port towns from Morro Bay to San Francisco to Crescent City. These fishing operations use boats ranging from 30 to 70 feet, with one to four fishermen per boat working tirelessly to bring crabs to your dinner plate. The fishery is inherently sustainable, with every female crab returned to the ocean and a strict minimum size limit that allows the population to replenish itself. It’s a fishery all seafood lovers can be proud of.

But these new measures are coming at us hard and fast. In the cloistered world of our state’s commercial fishing communities, the decision to close the fishery three months early came as a 10,000-volt shock. The Dungeness crab fishery already has been dealing with hardship in the form of severe toxic algal blooms for several years now. The ability of California fishermen to provide a seafood resource that the public rightfully owns is now even more constrained.

This legal settlement, and the Endangered Species Act, have made high demands of our industry, and we will rise to them. Crab fishermen, along with state and federal agencies’ staff, environmental organizations and the teams that disentangle whales, have been working together for four years to address entanglement and find solutions. Called the California Dungeness Crab Fishing Gear Working Group, this multidisciplinary collaborative will be helping the state make good decisions in crab fishery management going forward. The working group already has demonstrated major success: Before this closure, not a single ESA-listed whale was confirmed to be entangled in California crab gear in the 2018-19 season.

The decisions we make, and the actions we take in the future, could mean the difference between a period of belt tightening, or the implosion of California’s fishing communities. Our leaders’ decisions must be wise, based on the best available scientific information and based on the realities of the crab fishing industry. And, in the meantime, we need to seriously invest in repairs to our crumbling infrastructure at our working waterfronts and find ways to support coastal communities if fishery managers pull the crab fleet off the water yet again.

If we fail to take a balanced approach, the availability of our state’s local, sustainable Dungeness crabs could be severely and unnecessarily limited next holiday season and in future years. The people of California must be allowed to have their crabs and eat them, too.

Noah Oppenheim is the executive director of the Pacific Coast Federation of Fishermen’s Associations