photo credit: CDFW/C. Juhasz

If you're planning to serve crab on Christmas, there's another delay for the commercial dungeness crab season off California's coast.

The California Department of Fish and Wildlife has made the decision to keep the fishery closed, likely through the new year; and that's for two reasons, said Ryan Bartling.

"The director of the Department of Fish and Wildlife announced a continued delay of the commercial dungeness crab season statewide, due to entanglement risk of large whales," Bartling said. "It's also being delayed at the Sonoma-Mendocino County line to the Oregon border, due to public health concerns from domoic acid."

Domoic acid is a naturally occurring toxin produced by certain kinds of algae, and Bartling said it can build up in crustaceans.

"It can be contained in the meat and what's called viscera," Bartling said. "Essentially it can cause paralysis; the worst outcome is, is death."

"So the Department of Public Health does regular testing before the season opens, and if it's above certain levels, they issue either an advisory or the season is delayed," Bartling said.

Geoff Shester, with the conservation organization Oceana, said this year has also seen an alarming number of whale entanglements.

"We've had the highest number of confirmed whale entanglements that we've seen in six years," Shester said. "So while there has been, I think, quite a lot of effort put into reducing these entanglements of humpback whales, in particular in dungeness crab gear, it's really a signal that the efforts have not done enough."

Shester said there's no definitive explanation for the large number of entanglements.

"Certainly there is some climate change related causes to this in terms of compressing the habitats and pushing the whales closer to shore where they're overlapping with the fishing gear," Shester said. "But this is a trend that we had hoped that would decrease, but unfortunately is increased this last year."

Depending on the next state wildlife agency decision, the commercial dungeness crab season could open on January 1st.