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WASHINGTON – The Chesapeake Bay’s famous blue crabs – feisty crustaceans that are both a regional symbol and a multimillion-dollar catch – are hovering at historically low population levels, scientists say, as pollution, climate change and overfishing threaten the bay’s ultimate survivor.
This fall, a committee of federal and state scientists found that the crab’s population was at its second-lowest level in the past 17 years, having fallen to about one-third the population of 1993. They forecast that the current crabbing season, which ends Dec. 15 in Maryland, will produce one of the lowest harvests since 1945.
This year’s numbers are particularly distressing, scientists say, because they signal that a baywide effort to save the crab begun in 2001 is falling short.
Governments promised to clean the Chesapeake’s waters by 2010. But that effort is far off track, leaving “dead zones” where crabs can’t breathe.
Maryland and Virginia have changed their laws to cut back the bay’s crab harvest. But watermen have repeatedly been allowed to take too many of the valuable shellfish, scientists say. The watermen, meanwhile, say they’re being unfairly blamed.
“Now it appears that even the hardy blue crab is approaching its breaking point,” said Howard Ernst, a professor at the U.S. Naval Academy and a critic of government efforts to protect the Chesapeake. If the crab’s population drops further, Ernst said, “what we ultimately lose is not only a resource, but a unique and irreplaceable cultural heritage.”
In the 1990s, the crab’s population began to fall off rapidly. Since 2000, it has been at a historically low ebb.
There were about 852 million crabs in the bay in 1993, but there are now about 273 million, according to the committee of federal and state scientists, which issued a report in September. Over the past 17 years, only 2001 had a lower figure.
The Chesapeake crab harvest, which exceeded 100 million pounds at its peak in the 1960s, fell to 48.9 million pounds last year.
“We’ve gone where we’ve never been before,” said Douglas Lipton, a University of Maryland professor who has studied the Chesapeake fishing industry. “Nobody can prove ... that the resource can come back from that abundance.”
The immediate future doesn’t look much better. The number of crabs less than a year old, a crucial indicator of how the population will look in the next year or two, fell to its lowest level in 15 years last winter.
The reasons for the decline probably include climate change, because the water now is often too warm for a grass species the crabs use as shelter. But the causes also include two problems that governments have promised – and failed – to fix.
One is the water. Rain washes down manure, treated sewage and suburban fertilizer, which cause algae blooms that remove oxygen from the bay’s water. Low-oxygen “dead zones” can kill crabs or push them out of their preferred habitat.
State and federal governments promised to clean up the pollution by 2010. Now officials admit that the effort – led by the Environmental Protection Agency – is far behind schedule. The remaining tasks are massive: stopping runoff at tens of thousands of farms, replacing hundreds of thousands of septic tanks, overhauling numerous sewage plants. The work will cost billions of dollars, officials estimate, and much of the money is not available.
“We know what to do” to clean it up, said Ann Pesiri Swanson, the executive director of the Chesapeake Bay Commission, an advisory group of state officials from around the watershed. “We just bloody don’t have the money to do it.”
The crab’s other problem is the harvest. Watermen using wire-mesh “pots,” “trotlines” baited with bull lips and metal dredges catch millions of crabs every year. Maryland and Virginia, which share the bay, sought to limit the catch in 2001, with rules about what days watermen could work and the minimum size of crabs they could keep.
But although the harvest went down, crabbers were still able to catch what scientists say is an unhealthy number of crabs in 2001, 2002 and 2004. And they’re on pace to do it again this year, according to a recent estimate.
Particularly troubling, some scientists say, is the number of female crabs that watermen catch. These crabs, which are usually picked of their meat and used in soups and crab cakes, are the key to the species’ reproduction. But millions of them are caught, scientists say, before they are able to spawn.
“Unless you protect those females ... well, you haven’t done anything” to help the population rebound, said Yonathan Zohar of the University of Maryland Biotechnology Institute in Baltimore. To supplement the population, his lab has experimented with raising baby crabs in a laboratory and releasing them into the wild.
One popular suggestion is a permanent “sanctuary” to protect females along their migration route.
Watermen, however, reject the idea that they are behind the crab’s decline. In their view, the problem is the polluted water.
“Harvesting the crabs is not the problem,” said Larry Simns, president of the Maryland Watermen’s Association. “It’s what we’re putting in the bay that’s the problem.”
The decline in crab numbers seems to be rippling through the bay’s ecosystem. Some clam species, usually the prime food for crabs, seem to be surviving in greater numbers. On the flip side, scientists fear that crab predators such as striped bass and croaker might soon suffer.
There seems to be little danger that the crabs will go extinct in the bay. Nothing that produces 3 million eggs at a time will go easily.
Crabbers, though, might be a different story. The bay’s roughly 3,200 crabbers caught $45 million worth last year. But they are being squeezed by rising prices for boat fuel and an influx of cheap foreign crabmeat.
“There will be an economic disaster,” said Lynn Fegley, an official at Maryland’s Department of Natural Resources, “before there’s an extinction event.”
