| Welcome to Bw Reads, our weekend newsletter featuring one great magazine story from Bloomberg Businessweek. Today Andrew S. Lewis explains how Stalin, Putin and climate change inadvertently turned Norway's most desperate fishing spot into a global seafood capital. You can find the whole story online here. If you like what you see, tell your friends! Sign up here. Near the end of 1991, the residents of Bugøynes, then a village of about 300 people in Norway's Arctic north, ran an ad in the national newspaper Dagbladet, begging somebody to relocate them en masse. Cod and other whitefish, once Bugøynes' bread and butter, were disappearing, and no one was quite sure why. The hamlet's only fish plant had closed years earlier. The local fishing industry had essentially collapsed, leaving the villagers near the Russian border stuck with few ways to earn a living. "The time has come," their ad read, "to put everything behind us and start again somewhere else." One cold afternoon this past February, Leif Ingilæ rolls a cigarette and laughs hoarsely as he recalls the results. "We got offers from French vineyards to move all the residents there to pick grapes," he says. "But we figured if everyone goes, we would all become alcoholics." Mostly, the younger generation moved south in search of work, while the lifers survived on unemployment benefits. Ingilæ, whose family goes back generations in Bugøynes, first went to sea in 1967, when he was 15 years old. When the newspaper ad ran, it seemed his time in the area was up; his boat was one of just three anchored in Bugøynes' harbor. Still, he stayed. A year later, on a routine fishing trip in Varangerfjord—the wide, clear fjord that links Bugøynes to the Barents Sea—he found in his gill net a huge, strange crab.  A fisherman in Bugøynes, circa 1970s. Photographer: Matti Saanio/Grenselandmuseet Its claws were exceptionally muscular, its six legs studded with spikes, its mouth wreathed with tiny "jaw legs" reminiscent of the Predator. Scores more, some pushing 25 pounds and with leg spans beyond 5 feet, started appearing in other people's nets. The community quickly learned that the crabs' powerful limbs could wreak havoc on fishing gear—tangling or tearing nets, stealing bait from longlines—and that the creatures could devour most any small marine life in their path. They seemed to be vacuuming the sea clean of the food sources many whitefish species need to survive, including bivalves, sea stars, even larvae. "We hated them," Ingilæ says. He called Norway's Institute of Marine Research (IMR), which identified the interloper as Paralithodes camtschaticus, the Kamchatka red king crab. It was an invasive species from Alaska, one that Soviet researchers had brought to Russia's side of the Barents Sea decades earlier. It also happened to be a delicacy, worth billions of dollars a year. The crab's popularity with wealthy diners started to change things for Bugøynes. Its numbers would need to be controlled to prevent it from spreading west and chewing up Norway's primary fish stocks, but for the locals here, perhaps it could take the place of the old cash crops. The Norwegian government established an experimental crab fishery in the region in 1994 and permitted commercial fishing of the species about a decade later. The desperate village, as well as others in the region, began to eke out a living catching crab instead of fish, alongside a much bigger Russian industry. In the meantime the original stocks of the crab in Alaska collapsed. An Alaskan fishery had harvested them aggressively while water temperatures rose beyond what the species could take. By 2022, Russia controlled 94% of the multibillion-dollar global market. That was until Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine that February and the US, along with many of its allies, banned the import of Russian seafood. In the weeks before the ban took effect, some importers raced to pack their warehouses with frozen legs and claws. California-based Arctic Seafoods Inc. paid more than $300 million for a massive order of Russian crab, about 6.5 million pounds. It was also swindled out of 6,000 pounds of that haul, according to an indictment against a Florida man who allegedly fooled the company by posing as a buyer for Safeway. (Arctic Seafoods didn't respond to requests for comment.) As it turned out, most major US and allied retailers immediately pulled all Russian seafood from their shelves. Red king crab can be kept frozen for as long as two years, but the negative publicity didn't seem worth it. A historical accident at the intersection of geopolitics and climate change had left only one place able to sate American appetites for the stuff: Ingilæ's backyard.  Sorting freshly caught crabs by hand. Photographer: Thomas Ekström for Bloomberg Businessweek Sitting with legs crossed in the cabin of the same stout 36-foot trawler he's owned for four decades, Ingilæ leans the elbow of his smoking hand on a dinette table. He's wearing a traditional Norwegian wool sweater, a gray beanie and black-framed glasses. His face is as creased and ruddy as you'd expect from someone who's spent a lifetime at sea. Across the harbor, boats line up at the dock of the old fish plant, now home to the exporter Norway King Crab. In the early years of catching the crabs, Ingilæ recalls, he was paid less than 5% of today's going rate. This particular morning, Norway King Crab is offering an all-time high of $27 a pound. It's selling the catch for close to double that price. Now, Ingilæ's boat is one of 917 in the area. While Russia is still catching vastly more red king crab (a quota of 28 million pounds last year) than Norway, the latter exported just about all its haul of 5.4 million pounds in 2023, a 42% annual increase worth $110 million. At Norwegian prices, US importers want the crabs alive, because ultrahigh-end restaurants can get far more for them that way. "We have places that will charge $900, $1,000," says Roman Tkachenko, chief executive officer of Direct Source Seafood LLC in Washington state. "The days of buying [frozen] king crab at 35 bucks and selling it at retail for 45, they're gone." In Bugøynes there's no longer talk of a mass exodus. Its fishermen, including Ingilæ, describe a comfortable life complete with annual vacations to the Mediterranean or the Caribbean. Whatever doesn't get exported forms the backbone of a growing crab-themed tourism industry. For Ingilæ the turnaround has yielded a rare sight among fishing towns everywhere these days: Both his son and grandson work on his boat. Today his younger peers can scarcely imagine a time without the crabs. There are, however, some signs that they might have to. In just three decades, the crabs have gone from scourge to savior. They still need to be managed as an invasive species, but now that they've become a pillar of the regional economy, the Norwegian government needs to take care to sustain them, too. Last year, after the IMR discovered a significant decrease in the weight of adult male crabs, the government cut the 2024 quota by almost 60% and ordered a two-month pause in fishing from March to May. A generation too young to remember the Dagbladet ad is getting a taste of the fear Ingilæ remembers well. Keep reading: The King Crab Kings Also, read Businessweek's Ones to Watch in Finance, Investing, Private Equity, Hedge Funds | 
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