Alaska Beacon

Southeast Alaska, home to the core of Alaska’s tourism industry, has largely recovered from the economic disaster caused by COVID-19, but the region still has fewer jobs than it did before the start of the pandemic.

Complete recovery may happen in 2023, attendees of Southeast Conference, a regional economic and local government conference, were told Tuesday in Ketchikan.

“We’re building back, but we’re not entirely there yet,” said Meilani Schijvens of Rain Coast Data, an economic firm that focuses on Southeast Alaska.

Scott Habberstad, chair of the Alaska Travel Industry Association Board of Directors, was cautiously optimistic.

“There’s a lot of opportunity for complete recovery and growth. But are we at the beginning of a recession and are we going to go into a recession?” he said, referring to the possibility of Federal Reserve interest rate increases.

“If we’re going into a recession, are people going to put their money into their pocket, or are they going to travel?” he said.

Southeast Alaska is heavily reliant on the tourism industry, and tourists who arrive in Southeast Alaska by cruise ship frequently travel to other parts of the state. The summer seasonal tourism industry employs thousands of Alaskans, some of whom rely on summer earnings to support themselves for the rest of the year.

Between 2019 and 2020, the number of tourists coming to Alaska fell by 82%. The number of cruise ship passengers arriving in the state dropped from more than 1.3 million to 48.

Southeast Alaska was among the hardest-hit places in the country by the resulting economic recession, Schjivens said. Businesses had spent millions of dollars preparing for the 2020 tourism season only to see it evaporate.

The regional fishing industry — another economic mainstay — also suffered in 2020 from poor salmon returns and low prices.

As a result, employment in Southeast Alaska dropped by 9,800 jobs — 24% of all jobs in the region — between June 2019 and June 2020.

Federal aid prevented many businesses from permanently closing, Schijvens said.

“The significant federal investments into the region in the form of COVID relief dollars worked as intended. Businesses, workers, and communities were able to continue in a stasis-like existence throughout the economically-impoverished early pandemic period, giving Southeast Alaska an economy to come back to in 2022,” she wrote in Southeast by the Numbers, an annual economic report card for the region.

As of June 2022, employment in Southeast Alaska remains 12% lower — down by 5,200 — than it was in June 2019.

Statewide, employment is down by 6%. For context, national employment was higher in June 2022 than it was in June 2019.

Business owners say conditions are better

Though the region hasn’t fully recovered, surveys conducted by Schijvens found business owners more optimistic about the future than at any point since the COVID-19 pandemic began.

Of 440 surveyed in 2021, 80% said the business climate was “poor” or “very poor,” and that was an improvement from 2020. This year, that proportion has dropped to 36%.

More than three-quarters of the businesses surveyed said they expect conditions to be better next year than this year.

Some of that optimism has been driven by the cruise ship industry’s rebound from COVID-19.

After the 48 passengers recorded in 2020, Southeast Alaska counted 124,600 cruise ship passengers in 2021. This year, Schijvens forecasts about 1 million tourists by cruise ship.

Optimism for 2023 but unknowns remain

Next year, based on the number of sailings and projected interest, she expects about 1.3 million — roughly the same amount that sailed to Alaska in 2019, the last year before the pandemic.

Air travel has also rebounded, with the number of passengers this year running only slightly below what it was in 2019.

“Tourism is back, and it is thriving,” she said.

Habberstad, who also works for Alaska Airlines, is more cautious. He said there’s several unanswered questions when looking ahead to 2023.

During the pandemic, Alaska was a convenient destination for Americans who couldn’t vacation internationally. Will that change? Will economic pressures force people to curtail spending? Will the war in Ukraine, COVID lockdowns in Asia and a strong dollar discourage international visitors from coming to Alaska?

Fall and winter are traditionally the times when tourists book trips for the next season. There’s a lot of opportunity but a lot of uncertainty, Habberstad said.

“I think we’ll have a better idea in December,” he said.

Republican Buzz Kelley, who finished fourth in Alaska’s U.S. Senate primary race, is suspending his campaign and asking his supporters to vote for fellow Republican Kelly Tshibaka.

The 65-year-old retired mechanic from Wasilla got just over 2% of the vote, qualifying him for the ballot behind Alaska’s sitting U.S. Senator Republican Lisa Murkowski, Tshibaka and Democrat Patricia Chesbro.

Kelley first announced the suspension of his campaign Monday morning on the Dan Fagan Show on radio station KENI. He referred to Democrat Mary Peltola’s recent House victory.

“After the Peltola victory over Sarah and Nick, it’s pretty clear that the old divide and conquer still works. And I don’t want to cause Kelly Tshibaka any problems and want to throw my support and (am) asking all the people that supported me or my ideas to throw their support behind Kelly Tshibaka, and we’ll see how it goes,” Kelley said on the phone Monday afternoon.

Calling Murkowski a “RINO,” he said she isn’t a good candidate and wants to see her move on. RINO is short for “Republican in name only.” Tshibaka, he said, is more aligned with his values.

“Kelly is to the right of Murkowski and I’m to the right of Kelly Tshibaka,” he said.

Kelley’s name will still appear on the ballot.

Kelley missed the Alaska Division of Elections’ Sept. 5 withdrawal deadline, “and there’s a reason for that,” he said.

The fifth-place finisher behind Kelley with 1.05% of the votes was Republican Pat Nolin. Had Kelley withdrawn in time, Nolin would have moved up to fourth place and been on the general election ballot.

“So there again, that would muddy the water between Murkowski and Tshibaka and I just don’t want to do that,” he said. “I’m rooting for Kelly Tshibaka and it’s going to be a hard fight anyway because she’s consistently behind Murkowski in votes, and Kelly’s going to need all the votes she can get, and it’s still going to be close.”

In official results, Murkowski led the primary with about 45% of the votes, Tshibaka came in second with 38.55% and Chesbro had 6.82%.

Kenai Peninsula Borough Mayor Charlie Pierce, one of four candidates for Alaska governor, was asked to resign as mayor after a secret investigation corroborated a harassment complaint against him and found the complainant’s report credible.

Pierce announced on Aug. 26 that he would resign his mayoral position at the end of September in order to focus on his gubernatorial campaign.

He has refused to discuss rumors that his resignation was motivated by a harassment complaint filed by a borough employee.

Members of the Kenai Borough Assembly, who were briefed about the complaint on Aug. 23, have also refused to discuss the issue, but after an hourlong closed-door meeting on Sunday, they issued a statement confirming the rumors and that Pierce was asked to resign voluntarily.

“As part of a potential mediated resolution, Mayor Pierce was asked to consider submitting his voluntary resignation because a voluntary resignation could provide greater opportunity for pre-suit resolution of this dispute,” the statement said in part.

Pierce did not respond to a phone call or text message seeking comment on Sunday evening.

According to the assembly’s statement, a borough employee and their attorney contacted the borough on July 11 and “reported allegations of harassment by Kenai Peninsula Borough Mayor Charlie Pierce.”

The borough treated the complaint as secret and hired an outside law firm, Ashburn and Mason, to investigate.

According to Sunday’s statement, “On July 26, 2022, Ashburn & Mason provided its confidential investigative report (to) the Borough Attorney that corroborated the complainants report and found the claims credible.”

The borough employee who filed the complaint hung up the phone when contacted by the Beacon and has not responded to text messages seeking comment. According to an individual who has spoken with the employee and is familiar with the case, the employee has an audio recording of Pierce harassing them and has other documentation.

According to the Borough Assembly’s statement, the borough has already agreed to spend up to $10,000 on mediation costs.

That amount does not include the cost of any financial settlement that may emerge from the mediation.

The Kenai Peninsula Borough has already paid $267,000 to settle two prior harassment complaints filed against Pierce.

The borough has rejected public records requests for a copy of the Ashburn and Mason report, and during Sunday’s special meeting, members of the assembly voted 8-0 against releasing it to the public.

Pierce finished fourth in Alaska’s top-four Aug. 16 gubernatorial primary, receiving 6.6% of the vote overall.

Incumbent Republican Gov. Mike Dunleavy received 40.4% of the vote, finishing first. He was followed by Democratic candidate Les Gara with 23.1% and independent candidate Bill Walker with 22.8%.

All four men will appear on the ballot in Alaska’s Nov. 8 ranked choice election for governor. The deadline to be removed from the ballot was Sept. 5.

Despite statements saying that he intends to focus on his campaign for governor, Pierce has failed to appear at any gubernatorial forums or debates since Aug. 26.

The Beacon has contacted the organizers of more than a half-dozen upcoming events. All have said that Pierce has either declined their invitations or has not responded.

Pierce was not present at Sunday’s Borough Assembly meeting and has said he will not be present at the assembly’s next scheduled meeting, on Sept. 20.

On social media, he has taken time to criticize the assembly for appointing Mike Navarre as the borough’s interim mayor.

That appointment was necessary because the borough will lack an executive officer following Pierce’s resignation and that of his chief of staff.

A special election is expected later this year or in early 2023.

On the route to one of Alaska’s most-viewed glaciers, there is little doubt about the destination. Visitors drive on Exit Glacier Road to get to the Exit Glacier trailhead of the 1-mile Exit Glacier trail that takes them to the face of Exit Glacier in Kenai Fjords National Park.

Now, with the climate continuing to warm, park managers are faced with a question: What will visitors do in that section of the park when rapidly shrinking Exit Glacier finally disappears from view?

“There’s going to be some big changes in how we think about this area,” said Benjamin Pister, leader of the park’s resource management team. “It’s not going to be about Exit Glacier in the future.”

Fister is coordinating a project at Kenai Fjords that is envisioning and planning for visitor services in the decades to come. The Kenai Fjords Frontcountry Management Plan seeks to guide operations to 2040 and perhaps longer.

There is an obvious need for such planning.

As of 2015, Exit Glacier had retreated a little over 1.5 miles in two centuries. The loss is accelerating; from the early 2000s to now, the retreat has been close to half a mile. And. It is not just the terminus that is shriveling; the glacier is becoming narrower, exposing large areas of rock.

What’s happening at Exit Glacier is being repeated across Alaska as warming temperatures hasten glaciers’ retreat. That is forcing managers of some of the state’s most popular tourism and recreation destinations to make changes now and plan for more in the future.

As Exit Glacier is shrinking, visitation to the Exit Glacier area of the park is steadily increasing, from about 120,000 in the summer of 2000 to more than 200,000 last summer, according to Park Service statistics.

The mile-long trail used by throngs of visitors, from elderly cruise ship passengers to young children to President Barack Obama in 2015, has been extended twice and now ends at a steep slope. Further extensions are impossible without some complicated and time-consuming blasting that would probably be futile, Pister said.

“By the time we built a new trail up to the glacier, the glacier won’t be there anymore,” he said.

Similarly, a stone pavilion along the trail that is now hemmed in by alder trees and other greenery. “This was built to have a nice view of the glacier. Obviously, it doesn’t anymore,” said Pister, stopping at the site. It has been repurposed to provide a natural history lesson about ecological changes that happen when glaciers disappear.

The park’s frontcountry management process is just in its early stages. So far, it has attracted some public comment, including suggestions from locals for more visitor amenities in a different site, nearby Paradise Valley, that gets snowmachine use in the winter.

Ultimately, the goal is to ensure that attractions for Kenai Fjords’ growing numbers of visitors do not disappear when Exit Glacier does.

There are some options, Pister said.

“Glaciers do some really amazing things to the landscape when they go away,” he said. Yosemite National Park, for example, is a big glacial valley, and the valley left by Exit Glacier could be something like that, he said. “I prefer to think of it as a new Turnagain Pass,” he said, referring to the mountainous area at the north end of the Kenai Peninsula.

Though Exit Glacier gets much of the attention, ice losses in Kenai Fjords are widespread.

A newly published study of 19 other glaciers in the park – a selection among the approximately three dozen that spill off the 700-square-mile Harding Icefield – found that 14 have lost “substantial area” since the mid-1980s. Between 1984 and 2021, the glaciers in the study showed a cumulative loss of about 16 square miles of ice area, about 57% of that at the terminus, or end, points and 43% along the sides. And the 2021 measurements may be already out of date, given how fast the losses are happening, said the study, by University of Washington and National Park Service scientists and published Aug. 5 in the Journal of Glaciology.

“Most obviously, the Kenai Fjords viewscape is changing dramatically as tidewater glaciers retreat onto land and land-terminating glaciers retreat into the alpine or out of sight around a bend,” said the study, which recommends annual updates. “Our measurements indicate that most of the glaciers in Kenai Fjords National Park are shrinking rapidly, leading to measurable annual landscape change.”

Like Kenai Fjords, other Alaska park or recreation sites with glaciers are undergoing rapid change – and some management adjustments.

At Portage Glacier, a popular Chugach National Forest destination about an hour’s drive south of Anchorage, the visitor center no longer offers views of the glacier face.  The center, built at the edge of Portage Lake with big picture windows facing the glacier, opened to the public in 1986; within a decade Portage Glacier had retreated out of sight, grounding on land on the opposite side of the lake. “Of course, the design was so you could see the glacier, and everything was sitting right here,” said Adrienne McGill, the Begich, Boggs Visitor Center’s director.

Now seeing Portage Glacier up close requires a trip across the lake, which many visitors do by motorized tour boat. Exhibits at the visitor center, which typically serves hundreds of people a day during the summer season, place a lot of emphasis on glacial retreat and the landscape changes that follow. Some leaf through the scrapbook of photographs at the front desk that shows Portage Glacier’s face from years past, and some are return visitors who are shocked by the changes, McGill said. “They reminisce a lot when they come here,” she said.

At Mendenhall Glacier in Juneau, a Tongass National Forest site that gets over 600,000 visitors annually, the Forest Service is going through its own process to upgrade facilities for what is expected to be an even bigger crush of tourists in a less-icy future. The situation is not as extreme as at Exit or Portage glaciers, but changes are coming, said Monique Nelson, a land management planner at the Tongass working on the project. “In the next 20 to 40 years, you probably won’t be able to see it from the visitor center,” she said of the glacier.

The Forest Service has a master plan to expand facilities, adding another visitor center closer to the glacier, and to transform footpaths into designated trails to take walkers to the ice edge. The plan also contemplates motorized boat tours, such as that at Portage. Some of that is controversial with Juneau locals, who have expressed concerns about overdevelopment of a well-loved recreational site, Nelson said.

At Denali National Park, where the sole park road is plagued with thaw-induced landslide dangers, most critically at the midpoint, glacial loss at higher elevations is affecting the mountain-climbing season. On Kahiltna Glacier, which is used as base camp for most Denali mountaineering expeditions, conditions are starting to get marginal for ski-equipped planes that ferry climbers on and off the mountain, said Mike Loso, a National Park Service geologist and glacier expert who works out of Wrangell-St. Elias National Park.

Because of melt dangers, in the latter part of the season, plane operations have to shift to a Kahiltna Glacier site about half a mile uphill, Loso said. That is as far as the planes can move, he said; crevasses and rock faces preclude any shifts farther uphill.

At Glacier Bay National Park in Southeast Alaska, 250 years of glacial retreat has been so dramatic that the land is actually rising. Through a phenomenon known as “isostatic rebound,” uncovered land that was previously compacted by heavy glacial ice has now sprung up, expanding the onshore territory.

For Glacier Bay’s visitors, the ice losses are a prime attraction.

Most Glacier Bay visitors come on cruise ships, and those cruise passengers want to see tidewater glaciers calving ice chunks into the sea, Loso said. There are about six or seven tidewater glaciers remaining in the park, but as they crumble and melt, they will “ground themselves out” and no longer extend to marine waters, he said. “The trend overall is clear, and I can say with confidence that there are going to be fewer tidewater glaciers for cruise ship passengers to look at over there,” he said.

That might mean a shift to Wrangell-St. Elias to the west, where Hubbard Glacier, currently the destination for only a few cruise ships, “is still huge and going to be calving ice for a long time,” he said.

Wrangell-St. Elias has its own trail problem linked to glacial retreat. The trail to Root Glacier, like the more heavily trod Exit Glacier trail, has been extended about 0.4 miles. That might seem like a minor distance, but it has made for some tougher travel to the park’s most accessible glacier, Loso said.

“You have to drop further down the hillside and go further up the valley every year to get to the ice,” he said. “In 30 years, what used to be an easy day hike for all of our visitors might be a much more challenging and difficult trip to make.”

There is potentially a side benefit of glacial melt: a big and expanding proglacial lake that didn’t exist 30 year ago at the base of Kennicott Glacier.  “It’s a new thing. McCarthy is sort of a lakefront town,” Loso said.

But glacial melt also creates dangers. An ominous trend in all the world’s mountainous and glaciated areas is the increasing risks for landslides and the localized tsunamis they cause as glaciers that buttress mountain slopes shrink. Glacier Bay and Wrangell-St. Elias, with their combination of glacial ice, steep mountainsides, coastlines and locations at latitudes where glacial conditions have become marginal, are considered global hotspots for such slides. At Glacier Bay, there were at least 24 large rockslides or rock avalanches that occurred between 1986 and 2016 that were tied to warming conditions, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.  Wrangell-St. Elias in 2015 had North America’s largest non-volcanic landslide on record, a huge slope collapse caused by the combination of glacial retreat and upper-elevation thaw. The resulting tsunami in Taan Fjord that rose as high as 633 feet up the opposite slope, ripping out trees. No injuries or effects on people in Alaska parks, but a similar landslide and tsunami in Greenland in 2017 killed four people.

Continued sweeping changes in Alaska’s glacial landscapes are considered inevitable.

Loso is working on a project to predict the rate of retreat in all of Alaska’s national parks. So far, results show that the outlook over the next few decades is grim for glaciers at parks across Alaska, he said.

“Wrangell-St. Elias is the only park that retains anything close to its glacial coverage,” he said. “Wrangell is the glacier heavyweight.”

Future generations of Alaskans and Alaska visitors present at the end of the century will likely catch only faraway glimpses of the glacial ice that is currently a fixture in the Alaska scenery, he said.

“When you look at the year 2100, the stuff we’re talking about, it’s going to be distant,” he said.  “It’s going to be hard for the public to see glaciers anywhere.”

Alaska Gov. Mike Dunleavy on Friday vetoed a bill that would have raised the minimum age to purchase and legally possess tobacco products from 19 to 21 years old. The bill also included a tax on electronic smoking products that contain nicotine, which is what Dunleavy took issue with.

Currently, Alaska has a cigarette tax of $2 per pack. Other tobacco products, like cigars, are taxed at 75% of the wholesale price. Electronic smoking products like vape pens that contain nicotine, on the other hand, are not subject to tax at the statewide level, though some municipalities have levied their own tax.

The tax portion of the bill was aimed at discouraging people from getting addicted, said bill sponsor Kodiak Republican Sen. Gary Stevens.

“One of the things we’ve seen in tobacco taxation is that every time taxes are increased on tobacco — and they have been increased several times in Alaska — people stop using it. The number of people who use tobacco decreases every time tax goes up,” Stevens said Friday afternoon.

In various versions of Senate Bill 45, the amount of tax on e-cigarettes changed over time. When the Senate passed the bill 15-4, the tax was 45% of the wholesale price. It got changed to 25% in the House committee process and again during amendments on the House floor. The version that passed the house 31-9 had a 35% tax of the wholesale price of electronic smoking products.

In vetoing the bill, the governor wrote, “There were many conversations about what an appropriate level to tax would be, but ultimately a tax increase on the people of Alaska is not something I can support.”

The bill would have put Alaska in line with the federal minimum age, which is 21, to purchase tobacco products. The bill would have also raised the minimum age of selling tobacco products to 21.

Stevens said if he’s back in the Legislature in January, he will pursue another version of the bill.

“It just means that we have to be smarter next year and work with the administration to make sure that we come up with a bill that they can support. And I think we will,” he said.

Stevens said it’s an important bill.

“It’s an issue of great importance. I think it should be with families and parents and children. You don’t want your kids addicted to vaping, particularly at a young age.”

This is the only bill that Gov. Dunleavy’s has vetoed in the past two years, other than vetoing specific line items in budget bills. It’s his second veto in his time as governor. The first bill he vetoed would have restrained a governor’s ability to pay some state employees more than the salary scale and to hire employees for temporary duties not designated by the Legislature.

When Natalie Bennett was walking surveying a beach on Annette Island as part of a team trying to defend Southeast Alaska from marine invaders, she made a major but ominous discovery: the state’s first documented shell of an invasive European green crab.

Bennett, a summer intern with the nonprofit Sealaska Heritage Institute who was working with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, noticed the tell-tale spines on the side of the eye areas. Right away, she notified one of her internship advisers, Barb Lake of NOAA Fisheries.

“I told her, ‘This is kind of concerning me,’” Bennett said. “I handed it to her, and she said, ‘No, it can’t be.’”

Bennett’s July 19 discovery was the first step in confirming that European green crabs had spread farther north on the continent than ever been recorded before. They are small but highly aggressive crustaceans that are notorious for damaging native ecosystems.

Two days later, the team found Alaska’s first dead European green crabs in the area. Live crabs were found in the days to follow.

That was not a surprise, said an official with the Metlakatla Indian Community, the island’s tribal government that, in partnership with NOAA Fisheries, is leading the green crab search.

“Once you find the shells, it’s not very long after that there are live crabs,” said Genelle Winter, a grant coordinator with the Metlakatla Indian Community.

And as of Sept. 6, the tally was 94 live crabs, eight dead crabs and 21 carapaces or hard upper shells, Winter said.

Annette Island, on which the town of Metlakatla is located, is at the far southeastern corner of Alaska. Movement of European green crabs into the area was considered almost inevitable, but this summer’s discoveries were stunning nonetheless.

“I just kind of figured eventually they would get up here. Be we all thought it would be a few years before they made it up here,” said Bennett, now back in her hometown of Juneau. “We just weren’t expecting them already.”

European green crabs — which, despite their name, can be red, yellow or mottled as well as green — are native to western Europe and northwestern Africa. They have been working their way westward since the early 1800s, when they were found on the U.S. East Coast, likely carried in ships’ ballast, according to NOAA.

The crabs made it to the West Coast by 1989, when they were discovered in San Francisco Bay. They have spread north since then, likely helped along with warming marine conditions resulting from climate change. In 2020, according to the Alaska Department of Fish and Game, green crab larvae were found in Prince Rupert, British Columbia, and the following summer, a population of adult green crabs was found on the province’s Haida Gwaii archipelago – dangerously close to Southeast Alaska.

The state Department of Fish and Game website lists a litany of negative impacts.

Besides cutting up eelgrass beds that are important for salmon and other fish, European green crabs gobble up native clams, mussels, snails and other species; they have been known to wipe out entire mussel beds, according to Fish and Game. They also have the potential to displace native crabs, including Dungeness, and they prey on oysters, which are important to the Alaska mariculture industry, Fish and Game warns.

People in Southeast Alaska were already worried about the green crabs prior to their discovery in the state, “because they’re super-invasive and really good at destroying ecosystems,” Bennett said. “They shred eelgrass. They just destroy everything.”

To look for the invaders, she drew on lessons from her youth, when she accompanied an uncle on his forays collecting crab carapaces for sculptures. She found the green crab carapace on the highest tide line — coincidentally, right below a sign that instructed people to be on the lookout for the invasive and destructive crabs.

Now that residents of Metlakatla and their partners have found the crabs, what will they do?

“That’s a fantastic question. It’s one we’ve been asking ourselves ever since it happened,” Winter said.

The immediate focus is on plucking the crabs out of the water to prevent proliferation and spread. They are small, only about 2.5 to 4 inches across, and through some trial and error, Metlakatla residents and their partners have found that shrimp traps are the most effective tools for capturing green crabs.

Those they have collected are being stored in a freezer, with some samples sent out for DNA analysis, Winter said.

So far, the live crabs have been found only around a spot called Tamgas Harbor, though carapaces and carcasses have been found elsewhere, she said.

And so far, Winter said, there haven’t been any noticeable effect on fish populations. But there has been cut eelgrass, a typical result of European green crab presence, she said.

The effort to find and capture the invasive crabs will continue as long as the tribe has funding for it, Winter said. “This is not a one-and-done operation. This is something that’s going to require a sustained effort over a long period of time,” she said.

The European green crab search-and-destroy mission is part of a broader campaign throughout Alaska to prevent the arrival of invasive species or, if they are present, to remove them.

Beyond Southeast Alaska, a particularly troublesome invasive species that have become established in the Southcentral and Interior regions is elodea, a fast-growing freshwater weed that can damage salmon spawning habitat and pose safety dangers to floatplanes. Another invasive species in Southcentral is northern pike, a fish that has been improperly transported from its natural range farther north and has fed on native fish in Southcentral lakes. Agencies and organizations are also on the lookout for zebra mussels, creatures that can attach to boats and be carried to new environments. In May, a boat being pulled northward by land was inspected at the Alaska-Canada border and found to have zebra mussels attached, albeit dead. It was decontaminated before being allowed to proceed to Alaska, according to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, which staffs the border with agents to monitor such incidents.

As for Bennett, she is headed to the University of Alaska Southeast in the spring and is considering further studies in marine biology. She also remains curious about the European green crabs’ movement into Alaska. “I wish I were still in the internship so I could know how many more crabs they caught,” she said.