King crab pot

King crab pot tested with good results at locations including Nordkapp. The pot fishes well, leads to less damaged crab and more value from the catch. It is made from top-quality materials and has delivered very good catch results.

A total of 1221 crabs were caught across 9 sea trials, in which the AMarin pot was compared with the BN pot. On average the BN pot caught 38.4 (± 54 S.D) crabs, of which 7.8 (± 11.3 S.D) were of commercial size. The AMarin pot had an average catch of 53.6 (± 47.5 S.D) crabs per pot, of which it caught an average of 13.3 (± 7.9 S.D) commercial crabs per pot, which was significantly higher than the BN pot.

The average crab size (mm) using the BN pot was 121.8 mm for males and 98.1 for females, which was significantly smaller compared with the AMarin pot, which had an average size of 125.5 mm for males and 105.6 mm for females. As shown in figures 1 and 2, the BN pot retains the smallest size groups of crab better than the AMarin pot. The differences were especially large for female crabs. The AMarin king crab pot selects out the smallest crab below 90 mm better than the BN pot. The share of undersized crab was highest in the BN pot at 79.6 % compared with the AMarin pot at 48.4 %. We also see that the average share of damage was higher in the BN pot (37.1 %) compared with the AMarin pot (17.8 %), although no significant differences were found. When we split by sex and look at the size distribution between the AMarin and BN pots, we see a different frequency distribution for male crabs but not for female crabs (Fig 2 a and 2b). Furthermore, the sex distribution in the BN pot was 51:49 (male: female) versus 74:26 for the AMarin pot. In other words, the share of males is greater in the AMarin pot compared with the BN pot.