Archive of Spotlight Feature Articles

Saving the Chesapeake Blue Crab

by Jack Greer

In Chesapeake Bay country blue crabs are king. Not only do crabs bring tourists from around the region and beyond to enjoy a taste of summer, but crabs have supported shoreside communities for generations, and have become part of the very fabric of life in Maryland and Virginia.

Blue crabs have grown in importance since the demise of the Bay's oyster industry, which once overshadowed crabs but has been crippled by overfishing, pollution and disease. While local watermen and their waterside communities once depended on oysters in the winter and blue crabs in the summer - and striped bass, croaker and other fish in between - the crab has now become the mainstay of the Bay's commercial fisheries. According to one recent study, some two-thirds of the fishing income made by watermen in the Bay depends on the blue crab.

So much is riding on Calinectes sapidus - the Bay's beautiful swimmer - that managing the fishery has become a top priority in the region, and has brought about a delicate dance among regulators, environmentalists, politicians, and the watermen and seafood processors who depend on the blue crab for their livelihood. At the heart of the controversy is the Chesapeake Bay Commission and its Bi-State Blue Crab Advisory Committee (BBCAC), which includes the critical participation of the region's natural resource agencies, most notably the Maryland Department of Natural Resources, the Virginia Marine Resources Commission, and the Potomac River Fisheries Commission, as well as the Maryland Sea Grant College.

Also central to the management effort is the Chesapeake Bay Stock Assessment Committee (CBSAC), with key involvement of NOAA's Chesapeake Bay Office. As with other fisheries, harvest data is collected by the states and is managed and made available by NOAA's National Marine Fisheries Service.

Tom Miller, of the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science, has played a key role in determining a safe threshold for blue crab harvests in the Chesapeake. His work on crab growth and lifecycle has been supported by NOAA/Sea Grant and others.

Working with historical harvest data and with fisheries-independent surveys carried out by researchers in both Maryland and Virginia, scientists like Tom Miller at the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science and colleagues at the Virginia Institute of Marine Science, the NOAA Northeast Fisheries Science Center and elsewhere were able to help guide the jurisdictions toward adapting a safe threshold for the protection of the Chesapeake's crab stock.

At the same time, it became abundantly clear that in addition to the very best science we can marshal, the bi-state effort needed to include the human dimension of the crab controversy, and for that they needed better information about the economics and social context of crabbing and crabbers.

To help analyze the economic status of the fishery, Maryland Sea Grant Extension leader Doug Lipton worked with economists at the Virginia Commonwealth University and elsewhere in the region to capture the profile of commercial crabbers, many of whom are now in their 50s and 60s. Lipton also analyzed seafood processing industries that remain central to the economies of remote communities, such as those found on Maryland's lower Eastern Shore. As part of his analysis, "The Economic Impact On Maryland's Crabmeat Processing Industry Of Proposed Regulations," Lipton determined that current size and sponge crab restrictions will cause significant economic hardship for processors already reeling from cheap imports, labor costs and competition with the popular retail basket trade

Beyond the biological and economic structure of the fishery lies the deep-rooted social fabric of the crabbers themselves, known for their rough wisdom and their remarkable intimacy with everything that crawls or swims through the Chesapeake Bay. Working with the bi-state committee and local leaders, Ann Swanson (Chesapeake Bay Commission) and I (Maryland Sea Grant) helped to stage two exploratory dialogues between scientists and watermen on Maryland's Smith Island and Virginia's Tangier Island. After rising early to set out with watermen - to hear firsthand about their current experiences and observations - the scientists later joined the commercial crabbers for a frank discussion about regulations, crab biology and the eternal unpredictability of nature.

Anthropologist Michael Paolisso participated in these dialogues, and is now working with support from NOAA/Maryland Sea Grant to stage further investigations into the beliefs, values and knowledge that watermen and others bring to their decisions about the blue crab and the fishery it supports.

Clearly, ensuring the long-term health of the Bay's blue crab population will require a sustained effort on all fronts: more complete scientific analyses of the crab and its life cycle, improved information about the real scale of the harvesting effort and the current economic structure of the fishery, and a better understanding of the values and wisdom of those who catch crabs for a living. Without working together on all these facets of the blue crab fishery, successful management may prove as elusive as that big Jimmy scooting away from a dip net.

Related web sites:

Maryland Sea Grant's blue crab web node:
http://www.mdsg.umd.edu/crabs

Maryland Department of Natural Resources blue crab site:
http://www.dnr.state.md.us/fisheries/commercial/SummaryofProposedCrabActions.html

Virginia Institute of Marine Science crab site:
http://www.fisheries.vims.edu/femap/fish%20pages/Blue%20Crab.htm

[7/29/02]

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