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April 1932. 6 days had passed since the train had left Vladivostok. The wheels were rattling rhythmically over the rail joints, but the regular clickety-clack echoed painfully in the heart of Ivan Zaks, an employee of the Pacific Institute of Fisheries.
The unsuccessful experiment of Ivan Zaks
April 1932. 6 days had passed since the train had left Vladivostok. The wheels were rattling rhythmically over the rail joints, but the regular clickety-clack echoed painfully in the heart of Ivan Zaks, an employee of the Pacific Institute of Fisheries.
Eight of the ten crabs he had loaded onto the train in Vladivostok were already dead. He, it had seemed, had done everything right. He’d put the crabs in large saltwater tanks set up in a goods wagon. The water was changed daily, and oxygen was passed through the tanks from cylinders from time to time. But still the crabs had died.
… Ivan Zaks neatly laid the ninth dead crab on a railway embankment, and quickly returned to his compartment. One more day’s journey remained before the train would reach Krasnoyarsk. He got a pencil and a piece of paper and began to write quickly:
To A. M. Golovsky, Deputy Head of the Main Fishing Industry Directorate
According to your assignment I have to deliver caviar and ten female crabs from Vladivostok to Murmansk.
I must inform you that unfortunately all the crabs have died.
But I am sure that King crabs will adapt to the Barents Sea, which I know well, because I worked at the Murmansk Biological Station for four years.
Zaks crumpled up the piece of paper …
He had thought of everything. The only thing he’d failed to take into consideration was the wagon jolting. The crabs, his intuition told him, had to be transported by sea –either via the Indian Ocean and then the Suez Canal (the quickest route), or via the Pacific, the Panama Canal and the Atlantic.
But his bosses were in a hurry: the country’s leaders wished to have the valuable resource in the Barents Sea as soon as possible. There was no threat from sophisticated Japanese competitors there, and the USSR could have the ‘live asset’ –the crabs– to itself.
…The train was approaching Krasnoyarsk.
Ivan Zaks became interested in hydrobiology while studying in the Faculty of Natural Sciences at the Sorbonne.
Then came the war and four years of German captivity, from where he escaped after three unsuccessful attempts.
He returned to hydrobiology only in 1921, when he started work as a zoologist at the Murmansk Biological Station. It was at that time that he got the idea that the Barents Sea might be an ideal place to breed the King crab.
And in 1925 he left for the Far East to study the crab in its natural habitat and to best prepare such an experiment.
…The station platform came into view.
But there were no crabs in the goods wagon any more. Ivan Zaks had thrown out the last one, just before the train reached Krasnoyarsk.
The train was now going to Moscow…
The empty tanks in the goods wagon car were rumbling over the rail joints…
Not long afterwards, Ivan Zaks was arrested on a false charge…
But he had the good fortune to go free. He moved to Batumi to avoid being arrested again; before the war, the Far East was been protected from suspect elements.
The talented Russian scientist Ivan Zaks died while being evacuated to Tashkent. He was just 53.
Yuri Orlov: the man who moved the King crab to the Barents Sea
Excerpt from a letter from Mr Sukhoruchenko, Head of Murmansk Economic Council, to Mr Mironov, Head of the Main Fish-Breeding and Fisheries Directorate, dated 10 July 1959:
To enrich the fauna of the Barents Sea, the Economic Council considers it desirable to conduct an experiment in acclimatising the King crab to the Barents Sea.
I request that you provide a delivery of a pilot batch of male and female King crabs in 1960.
Left alone in his laboratory, full of aquariums and cylinders, Yuri Orlov tried to imagine how it might be possible to tackle this task…
Most likely, there would be no problems with the transport containers. They could be made at the Central Industrial Acclimatisation Station, where he worked at the time.
Everyone at the Main Fish-Breeding and Fisheries Directorate, with which they shared a building on Krasnoselskaya Street in Moscow, had already had enough of the constant smells of glue, hot polythene and organic glass from which they made transport containers for fish.
…The crabs would have to be transported by air. They could do that as well; it was no coincidence that the station’s emblem was a flying fish.
But how would the crabs feel during the flight?
They would have to turn to friends from the Civil Aviation Institute.
Once, some chickens were being transported by air and they all died when the plane came to land. After this, a laboratory with a pressure chamber for testing perishable cargoes was set up at the institute.
They had already lifted fish to the equivalent of a height of 12 kilometres in this pressure chamber. The fish had survived; so, most likely, would the crabs.
There would be no problems with the oxygen for purging the aquariums either.
The laboratory was full of the aviation cylinders that are kept in planes in case of depressurization in the passenger cabin. And they had long been friends with the pilots.
The main problem remained where to get money for the transportation.
…Nikita Khrushchev's visit to America created a sensation. In spite of the Soviet leader’s shoe-banging at a session of the General Assembly of the United Nations, the leaders of the USA and the USSR decided to visit each other for the first time.
The next year, in 1960, President Dwight D. Eisenhower promised to visit the Soviet Union.
And then the heads of the Central Industrial Acclimatisation Station had an adventurous idea: why not treat the American president to a dish of the freshest crabs, just brought from the Far East?
The Minister of Fisheries liked the idea. And the money to transport the crabs was given.
TASS Communication. 1 May 1960.
‘Today, an anti-aircraft missile brought down an American high-altitude spy-plane near Sverdlovsk. The pilot was captured.
Because of this, TASS is authorized to declare a protest against the provocative actions of the American authorities. In future, all similar attempts will be stopped just as decisively.’
In response, the American president declared he would not come to the Soviet Union. But, to the scientists’ surprise, no one cancelled the ministry’s special task. And soon the first lot of live crabs were flown to Moscow.
However, the first ‘travellers’, which were delivered extempore, without careful preparation, were fit only for cooking. It was not worth waiting for descendents from them. Eisenhower didn’t get a gourmet dish, but it became clear that it was possible to transport live crabs for thousands of miles.
21 October 1960
Moscow
Central Industrial Acclimatisation StationI am taking a flight from Vladivostok. I am bringing 9 female crabs and 12 million pieces of caviar.
Orlov
27 October 1960
Report on a scientific seminar at the Murmansk Institute of Marine Biology.
[This scientific seminar was remembered at the Murmansk Institute of Marine Biology for a long time. Orlov arrived quite unexpectedly with the crabs. Nobody had expected that the experiment would be successful.]
Prusevich: It is not clear why the crabs have been brought here! While we are looking for food for the larvae, they could die.
Gerasimov: Such planning seems thoughtless to me. Naked empiricism!
Orlov: We are not amateurs, but professional acclimatisation experts!
Galkin: We were against this experiment. However, the crabs have been brought and something needs to be done.
Mikhailova: I request you not to get at Comrade Orlov, but to state your negative opinions not to him, but to the higher authorities.
Orlov: I have heard many objections today. You can join in the work if you want –if not, we will do it ourselves!
The crabs Yuri Orlov brought lived in an aquarium at the Murmansk Biological Station for 6 months.
Only in spring 1961, when the scientific basis for the experiment had been formally established, and a second lot of animals had been delivered from Kamchatka, were the crabs finally released into the Barents Sea.
And it was only in 1974 that the first of Orlov’s King crabs was caught in the Barents Sea. But that is another story…
In the evening of 3 August 1974, the phone rang in one of the Murmansk Polar Institute laboratories. Yuri Simukov, a research scientist there, answered it.
The caller lived in Murmansk. He said: ‘You know, I’ve just caught some sort of animal here. It’s most likely a crab. It’s in the bath now, and if you’re interested I can show it to you, because we’re going to eat it soon.’
Without a second thought, the scientist took a taxi and rushed to the specified address. He was afraid he’d be too late.
It was Saturday and, from the sound of the phone conversation with the successful fisherman, there was a cheerful crowd at his place. The crab’s fate was sealed: it was going to be eaten for dinner.
Unfortunately, we do not know the lucky fisherman’s first name, just his surname: Bogdanov.
That morning he had gone to Kola Bay to fish for cod with a hand line, as he often did. He cast the line and immediately caught something. He pulled it out. But it was… a black felt boot.
He cast again… And this time he pulled out an animal unprecedented for these waters: a huge crab with a shell covered in spines. One of its claws had got tangled in the line.
Thus, on 3 August 1974, the first King crab to fall into the hands of expert biologists was caught. It was just the beginning…
Murmansk. Polar Institute. 1 July 1976.
At point with coordinates 68°57 and 36°55, large crab caught by trawl at depth 150 m. Shell size: 20 cm.
The Captain of the scientific research vessel Tunets.
The messages came thick and fast:
Murmansk. To the Head of the Polar Institute. 15 September 1976.
Crab of unusual size caught. Weight: 4 kg 250 g. Released into sea.
The Captain of the Tolpygo.
Meetings between Russian Underwater Expeditions project participants and the King crab.
Divers first saw the crabs on 5 July 1999, in Dalnie Zelentsy Bay. One of the crabs was sitting in thickets of seaweed, chewing a starfish. Another was eating up a sea urchin. Some were just sorting through pebbles, cleansing them of seaweed. It was apparently the first time they had seen people, and they were not greatly diverted from their tasks.
One look was enough to understand that they were not ‘guests’ there any more, but, rather, the owners of the sea bed. The crabs were moving without hurry, sedately, as they might at home. Before the expedition, locals had said the crabs ate everything, crossing the sea floor like a combine, chomping up everything alive. They had complained that the crabs tore nets and stole catches, and that the newcomers had ruined their livelihoods.
From the newspaper ‘Murmansk Fish Resources’, 20 March 2003:
At the opening of the international seminar, a well-known Russian scientist called the King crab a biological weapon Saddam Hussein would have had difficulty bettering had he been inclined to use it against Russia and Norway.
And none of the scientists who successfully acclimatised the King crab to the northern conditions had asked any fishermen if the crab was needed there or not.
On 5 June 2002 divers on one of the Russian underwater expeditions saw an unusual spectacle. They were already used to the King crabs, but this was a new phenomenon for them. The bottom under them was distinctly moving. At the first moment the divers thought they were suffering nitrogen narcosis. But their equipment showed they were only 15 metres down –not normally enough for nitrogen narcosis to take hold.
Only when they looked more closely did they see that a huge group of little crabs, smaller than a human hand, was moving under them. There were tens of thousands of them. It seems they gather in such heaps during moulting, when the crab sloughs its strong chitinous shell and becomes easy prey for many animals.
This example of mutual assistance produced an involuntary feeling of respect for these sea creatures, exotic for these waters.
