The great protein factory that was the Chesapeake Bay is sputtering. The shad, once abundant enough to feed George Washington’s army, are struggling to survive. Oysters are at historic lows. There are hardly any sturgeon left. Eels and clams have dwindled.
Could the blue crab be next? The Chesapeake’s iconic crustacean is in big trouble, with baywide crab harvests the lowest in decades. But some scientists say crabs don’t have to go the way of almost every other species in the bay. The lot of the blue crab could be turned around in a few years — even within a political term.
“The blue crab presents a grand opportunity for restoration and recovery,” said Ann Swanson, director of the multistate Chesapeake Bay Commission. “If you take action this year, you can see results by next year.” After a winter count of hibernating crabs found that the population remains alarmingly low, Maryland and Virginia said last week they will impose rules to cut by one-third the harvest of female crabs. Several leading scientists say a reduction of that magnitude should yield significant results in reviving the species if the states issue regulations that are effective.
But there is concern among scientists that the states may not be looking at the right rules.
“The Maryland approach, I don’t think, is very effective at all, to be honest,” said Anson Hines, director of the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center in Edgewater.
He and others worry that while the state will reduce the harvesting of crabs in certain parts of the bay, watermen will be free to step up their crabbing elsewhere.
But scientists say the one-third reduction can be achieved if the states commit to it.
The reason for optimism about the species’ revival is that female blue crabs are extremely fertile. And they mature within a year.
Female rockfish, in contrast, take several years to mature. Sturgeon, which live for decades, can take up to 20 years.
Unlike oysters, which are being ravaged by two deadly parasites, crabs are not dying from disease.
To bring back the crab, Maryland is considering bushel limits, a ban on catching soft crabs during part of the season, and a shorter season for catching females.
Virginia has already extended for six more weeks a ban on fishing in its protected areas, called “sanctuaries.” It also is considering ending its winter dredge fishery, during which watermen capture hibernating females.
Both states plan to announce the specifics of the new rules later in April.
While scientists believe that a one-third reduction is the right target for restoring the population, several said that establishing a sanctuary in Maryland would be a more certain way of attaining the goal.
In 2001, Maryland instituted restrictions on crabbing, including a shorter work week for watermen, when the winter survey showed the crab population nearing collapse. But the rules did not deliver the hoped-for rebound.
Hines and others say that was because Maryland focused on reducing fishing, not on rebuilding crab populations. Crabbers were able to work harder on the days they were allowed to crab, and the harvest was not cut as much as officials had hoped.
What the state needs to do instead, scientists say, is protect females as they migrate down the bay to spawn in Virginia waters. The best way to do that, they say, is by establishing a sanctuary that would close parts of the bay to crabbing during the weeks when females are on the move.
Hines, who has been working under a multimillion-dollar federal grant to study the migration corridors, says researchers know where they are and could establish protection zones fairly quickly. But Maryland officials say more research is necessary to know just where the sanctuaries should be and that could take years.
In the meantime, state Natural Resources officials say they are confident the rules they enact in 2008 will make a difference.
Ron Lipcius, a crab researcher at the Virginia Institute for Marine Science, agrees with Hines that establishing a sanctuary in Maryland would be better. It would hurt crabbers, he acknowledges, but not nearly as much as a moratorium would. Baywide, the crab industry has an economic impact of $120 million to $200 million a year, according to the two states’ governors. Given the consequences of losing that, a moratorium should be considered only if the situation were dire, officials say. And, Lipcius says, it’s not dire yet.
“At this point, we don’t have the justification that we’re about to collapse,” he said. “We’re somewhere on the edge, but we’re not in imminent danger of collapsing.” In 1985, Maryland rockfish stocks were so depleted that the state imposed a five-year moratorium. It devastated watermen, but the stocks recovered and the rockfish remains one of the bay’s few success stories.
But those involved in the rockfish moratorium say the fish were dying almost entirely from hooks. The blue crab faces other pressures besides the harvest. Though highly resilient, the crustacean is forced to contend with a bay that is far less hospitable than it once was.
The crabs’ prime habitat — lush sea-grass beds — is rapidly disappearing due to pollution from farms and sewage, which blocks the light the grasses need to grow. This nutrient pollution also feeds algae blooms which suck oxygen from the water. In the summer, crabs struggle to breathe in low-oxygen areas of the bay, and watermen sometimes pull up pots of dead crabs.
The crustacean also has lost much of its food, in part because shoreline development has killed the decomposing plant matter that feeds the small worms and clams that crabs like to eat.
Such environmental problems will not prevent the crab’s comeback, but they will slow it down, said Jacques van Montfrans, an instructor at the Virginia Institute.
“If there are enough females around to cause a big influx of these crabs to come into the bay, they also have to have a place in which to settle,” he said.
Three years ago, the federal-state Chesapeake Bay Program tried to make the connection between enjoying steamed crabs and protecting their habitat. It launched a $620,000 ad campaign warning people in the Washington suburbs that applying too much lawn fertilizer could cut into their summer crab feasts.
With cheeky slogans like “Save the crabs, then eat ’em,” the effort tried to appeal to people’s self-interest, said Chris Conner, a former Bay Program communications manager.
It worked, Conner said: Many in the targeted audience stopped fertilizing their lawns.
“For 20 years, we’ve tried to tell people about individual actions they can take to help the bay,” he said. “Instead of going for their minds, we tried to reach them through their stomachs.” Even scientists who question the effectiveness of Maryland’s and Virginia’s current proposals acknowledge that this year’s attempt to help the crab likely will be more successful than past efforts because the states are working together.
“There’s definitely a good opportunity here for a success story,” Lipcius said. “The issue of what success we’re going to get is still an open question.”
