Southeast Alaska’s summer commercial Dungeness crab season will close three weeks early, after Alaska Department of Fish and Game’s harvest estimate came in the lowest in at least 25 years.

The department announced June 29 that the summer season will close at 11:59 p.m. Saturday, July 25, after allowing a total of 40 days of fishing.

Crab gear must be removed from the water entirely by 11:59 p.m. Aug. 1, though pots may be stored in closed waters for up to seven days if all doors are secured fully open and bait is removed.

Whether there will be a fall season — and how long it will run — is undetermined. Department shellfish biologist Joe Stratman, in Petersburg, said that decision will come after department staff finish reviewing port sampling and fish ticket data, likely by the end of July.

This year’s harvest estimate looks to land just above 1.5 million pounds, near the bottom of a 1.5-million to 2.25-million-pound range laid out in regulation.

Coming within that range means the summer season can be closed after 28 days. The department opted for 40 days, the same call the department made the last time an estimate landed in a similar spot, in 2017.

A projection below 1.5 million pounds would have required an even earlier close, as few as 21 days, and no fall season at all. That threshold has never been crossed, though this year came the closest yet.

The numbers behind the estimate reflect a slow start to the season. Fishermen landed 388,000 pounds in the fishery’s first seven days — the lowest first-week total the department has recorded since 1994, and well below the previous 10-year average of about 860,000 pounds.

Stratman said the number of permit holders who fished this summer’s opening week, 120, also came in below the 10-year average of 161.

He said fishing was reported as particularly poor around Petersburg and Wrangell. He cautioned that pinpointing a single cause is difficult in a fishery managed without independent abundance surveys.

Molt timing, which varies year to year and place to place, could be a factor, he said. So could below-average recruitment of legal-size crab into the fishery.

He also acknowledged a longer-running trend: The spread of sea otters into inside waters. Areas such as Duncan Canal and the Kake area, he said, now see very little crabbing reflected on fish tickets — a change he attributes in large part to sea otters occupying those formerly abundant crab areas.

Since the management plan took effect in the early 2000s, the department has had to invoke its harvest-reduction measures five times: 2013, 2017, 2022, last year and this year. For the first time, the trigger has come in back-to-back seasons.

Last year’s harvest landed near the opposite end of the range, close to 2.21 million pounds — near enough to the 2.25-million-pound ceiling that the department ran a full-length fall season.

“I think people are really hoping things get better,” Stratman said. He added that the department has, in past years, pointed to sea otters as a factor reshaping where the fleet can fish, while stopping short of linking otters directly to region-wide harvest declines — a position he said is becoming harder to hold as the fishery continues operating on shrinking grounds.

As with past early closures, Stratman said the department is giving more than three weeks’ notice ahead of the closure, in part because many crab permit holders also fish salmon and need time to pull gear. Closing the fishery on a Saturday is timed to avoid overlapping with gillnet fishery openings, which typically run Sunday through midweek.