HOMER, Alaska — Roarke Brown, a charter boat captain since 1972 in this picturesque fishing village, remembers being able to tread out onto the Kachemak Bay mud flats at low tide to fill a 5-gallon bucket with clams in little time with minimal effort. Tanner and Dungeness crabs? Drop a pot; haul it up crawling with crustaceans. “There was a big commercial crab fishery here that’s been closed for decades,” Brown tells Mongabay, seated aboard the Pacific Shadow, his charter boat, in Homer’s busy harbor. “It’s just like a plowed field where we used to get clams. It’s no better for razors [clams) and mussels.” There’s a complex tangle of historical, ecological and climactic explanations for the decline of nearshore shellfish populations off Homer, across the Kenai Peninsula, and throughout the

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