Recreational Dungeness crab season postponed indefinitely

Larry Collins, (left) the president of the San Francisco Community Fishing Association, with local fish buyer Jude Smithson of Aloha Seafood, near crab pots on Pier 45 in San Francisco, Calif. on Thurs. November 5, 2015. less Larry Collins, (left) the president of the San Francisco Community Fishing Association, with local fish buyer Jude Smithson of Aloha Seafood, near crab pots on Pier 45 in San Francisco, Calif. on Thurs. ... more Photo: Michael Macor, The Chronicle Buy photo Photo: Michael Macor, The Chronicle Image 1 of / 53 Caption Close Recreational Dungeness crab season postponed indefinitely 1 / 53 Back to Gallery

Hold the melted butter because those Thanksgiving and Christmas feasts of fresh local crab will likely have to wait — possibly for a very long time.

The California Fish and Game Commission voted during an emergency meeting Thursday to suspend the recreational Dungeness and rock crab fishing season along the coast between Oregon and Santa Barbara after a potentially deadly neurotoxin was detected in the meaty delicacies. The season was supposed to kick off Saturday.

Chuck Bonham, director of the California Department of Fish and Wildlife, is expected to make a decision soon on whether to also close the $60 million commercial crab fishery, which had promised to deliver the seafood to stores and restaurants starting Nov. 15.

The health threat is so serious that crab industry veterans are on board with the clampdown.

“This is serious,” said Dave Bitts, president of the Pacific Coast Federation of Fishermen’s Associations, who believes there is no choice but to halt all crabbing until at least January. “We don’t need to have anyone get sick from eating a crab that we knew might have had something wrong with it. That is the worst thing we can do for ourselves.”

The toxin, known as domoic acid, is produced naturally by algal blooms linked to this year’s record Pacific Ocean temperatures. Known to cause seizures, coma and even death in humans and animals, the poisonous algae is estimated to be 40 miles wide and at least 45 feet deep along the Pacific coast.

Scientists who study ocean biology say the algae blooms, which have been detected continually since April, are the biggest and most toxic they have ever seen.

The suspension of recreational crabbing came after state biologists found high levels of domoic acid in crabs at eight ports from Morro Bay to Crescent City. That prompted the state Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment to recommend closing the year-round rock crab fishery and delaying the recreational and commercial Dungeness seasons.

The 3-0 Fish and Game Commission vote, with two commissioners absent, halts the recreational Dungeness season until testing shows the spindly crustaceans are clean. Fish and Wildlife officials said a decision by Bonham on whether to close the commercial season “is likely to come down in coming days.”

“I’m confident he will do the right thing, which is to close the commercial season for Dungeness and rock crabs,” Bitts said.

A very big business

Recreational crab fishing is a multimillion-dollar business, including equipment sales, boat rentals and guides. But the annual fishing boat scramble through the Golden Gate that marks the commercial season opening is, for many fishermen, a make-or-break proposition.

From 150 to 180 boats are poised to roll out of San Francisco, Half Moon Bay and Bodega Bay next week to stake out territory and sink crab pots. Although the start of the season has occasionally been delayed while crabbers and seafood processors haggle over prices, nobody can remember an interruption like this one.

“We’ve never had this in my career down here, and I’ve been fishing crabs since ’86,” said Larry Collins, president of both the Crab Boat Owners Association and the San Francisco Community Fishing Association. He noted that water temperatures measured 61 degrees Thursday when they should have been about 54.

There had been high hopes among commercial crabbers in California. Almost 13 million pounds of Dungeness were pulled in last year from Sonoma south to Morro Bay (San Luis Obispo County) — about 2 million pounds more than the previous year.

The price of fresh crab can vary, from about $4 to more than $10 a pound. If the season closes, Bay Area restaurants and other retailers will be forced to import crab from other states, like Washington, to fill the void. Merchants at Fisherman’s Wharf in San Francisco say wholesale prices could shoot up by as much as $3 per pound, a cost that undoubtedly would be passed on to customers.

Crabs from elsewhere

Bitts doubted that contention, saying a great many crabs peddled at Fisherman’s Wharf already come from other places.

“Those guys at the wharf get their crabs from wherever they can get them,” Bitts said. “Sure there is a little cachet in saying these are local crabs, but for most people a Dungeness crab is a Dungeness crab. It’s not like they didn’t get their crabs from faraway sources fairly regularly in the past.”

Health department officials, working with game wardens and marine biologists, said they will continue testing crabs and other sea creatures regularly over the next few months. It’s a difficult situation because the neurotoxin seems to be all over the place, with blooms expanding and merging.

The chemical makeup also appears to be changing in unpredictable ways. Researcher Anthony Odell of the University of Washington’s harmful algal bloom monitoring program said he found several species of algae in a single bloom, describing it as a “toxic plankton soup.”

Dangerous levels of domoic acid were found in anchovies earlier this year, forcing the closure of that fishery. Officials in California, Oregon and Washington have also implemented warnings or closures for sardine fishing.

The toxin accumulates in fish, shellfish and mussels and poisons the marine mammals, birds and people who feed on them. When it is sufficiently dense, it attacks the hippocampus, the brain’s memory center, and can cause memory loss, tremors and convulsions.

The poison has killed whales, harbor porpoises, fur seals, sea otters and sea lions, large numbers of which have been found convulsing with seizures, according to marine biologists. This year, 180 sea lions have been brought to the Marine Mammal Center in the Marin Headlands with domoic acid toxicity.

Recent studies have shown that the toxin can even affect the fetuses of pregnant animals.

Humans are not immune. Three Canadians died of domoic acid poisoning in 1987 after they ate mussels, according to a Stanford study. They were among 250 people from Prince Edward Island who became ill. A fourth person developed temporal lobe epilepsy and died two years later of pneumonia.

Blooms arrived in 1990s

Still, the mysterious blooms were virtually unknown on the West Coast until the 1990s. The algae that produces the toxin, known as pseudo-nitzschia, was first identified in the Monterey area in 1991. The first sign of domoic acid poisoning in Central California occurred on Memorial Day in 1998 when 400 sea lions washed ashore in Monterey Bay.

The blooms have since become bigger, more frequent and deadlier.

“We don’t actually know all the factors that lead to the algal blooms that produce domoic acid, but it has certainly become more common since the 1990s,” said Frances Gulland, a marine biologist at the center. She added that, in her scientific opinion, “It’s just scary.”

Peter Fimrite is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. E-mail: pfimrite@sfchronicle.com. Twitter: @pfimrite.