| Summary: | Along with the Arctic’s icy barriers melting which allows species to move northwards, new invasion corridors also arise with the opening of new shipping routes. The Snow Crab in the North West Atlantic is suspected to be a stowaway transferred via ballast water from the North Pacific. It was identified two decades ago in the southeastern Barents Sea and has been expanding its geographical range and abundance, thus allowing the opening of a new fishery in international waters. The high commercial value of the fishery has led to a proliferation of articles discussing the regulatory regime and management of the resource which poses challenges due its nature as a ‘sedentary species’ colonizing the Barents Sea continental shelf shared by Norway and Russia and approaching the fishery protection zone around Svalbard. Conversely, little research has looked into the implications of the invasion partly because the impacts are still beyond credible assessment due to biological uncertainties. For the purposes of articulating ecosystem management strategies we consider the value of the fishery and the potential impacts from the invasion in tandem. We look at the variation in participants in the Snow Crab fishery straddling Arctic waters which lends towards different productivity under different management and we delineate acceptable risk levels in order build up a bioeconomic framework that pinpoints the underlying trade-offs. We also address the difficulties of managing the resource under uncertainty and discuss how ecosystem dynamics alter with the introduction of a new resource. For that purpose we infer experiences from the Red King Crab, an invasive crustacean that has been wriggling its way into the Arctic, further south in the Barents Sea. Despite the differences in legal status and property rights, we use this experience to address overfishing issues, externalities upon neighboring jurisdictions and invasion frontiers control via commercial harvesting.
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