ABSTRACT
Over the past century, commercial king crab sheries developed into some of the world’s largest and most valuable crustacean sheries. The king crab industry was pioneered in northern Japan during the 1890s and expanded rapidly (1905-1920, Cahn 1948). The Japanese industry continued to expand with the development of oating factory ships and the leasing of cannery sites in Kamchatka, Russia. During the 1930s, Japanese factory eets even exploited the distant waters of the eastern Bering Sea. During the history of king crab shing, Imperial Russia became Soviet Russia (USSR) and then the Russian Federation; for convenience, I simply refer to these regimes as Russia. A Russian eet was developed in 1928 to sh in the Sea of Okhotsk (Ivanov 2002). Japanese and Russian king crab sheries resumed after World War II and soon reached prewar levels. Both countries also conducted sheries in the eastern Bering Sea starting in the 1950s.
