40-year crabber David Bailey says hypoxic water can show up like the flip of a switch, “If there are crabs in the pot, they’re dead. Straight up.”

Kristian Foden-Vencil/NPR

Scientists say West Coast waters now have a hypoxia season, or dead-zone season, just like the wildfire season.

Hypoxia is a condition in which the ocean water close to the seafloor has such low levels of dissolved oxygen that the organisms living down there die.

Crabber David Bailey, who skippers the Morningstar II, is rattled by the news. He remembers a hypoxia event out of Newport, Oregon, about a decade ago. He says it shows up “like a flip of a switch.”

“It shows up like a flip of a switch,” he says.

“If there are crabs in the pot, they’re dead. Straight up,”…