Background
In this chapter we handle species of particular conservation concern due to their population status. These are the species present in the Barents Sea area and also listed on the Global Red List (IUCN, 2008), the Russian Red Data book (Danilov-Danilyan et al., 2001) and/or the Norwegian Red List (Kålås et al., 2006). In this report the groups of species included are restricted to mammals, birds and fish species. This is caused by the general lack of knowledge and lack of relevant assessments for the other taxonomic groups for the Barents Sea area. Some information is available in the Norwegian 2006 Red List, but both the Global Red List and the Russian Red Data Book include to a minor degree such assessments. For future reports the goal should be to include a far broader spectre of taxonomic groups.
This species was deliberately introduced from the Far East to the Kola Bay and the adjacent waters of the Barents Sea by Russian scientists to enhance the fishing resources, in the 1960s. During the 1980s and 1990s they expanded to new areas and the crab reached the Norwegian shelf, and occupied practically all large fjords in the eastern Finnmark. Therefore, in the early 1990s, the crab caused he...
This species has not been deliberately introduced into the Barents Sea and is therefore considered to be an autoinvasive species. There are several hypotheses on how it was introduced and we think there are two probable ways. It may have migrated from the Beaufort Sea north through the Siberian Sea since it has been recorded in most areas along this track including the Kara Sea. Today distribution...
