According to Science News From 2018 to 2021, an estimated 10 billion snow crabs disappeared from the eastern Bering Sea off the coast of Alaska, with the population plummeting to record lows in 2021.  “It’s a fishery disaster in the truest sense of the word,” says Cody Szuwalski, a fishery biologist at the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Alaska Fisheries Science Center in Seattle

Now, a study in the Oct. 20 Science publication finds that a marine heat wave probably spurred a mass die-off, in part by causing crabs to starve.