title: “Going Going…” ShowToc: true date: “2022-12-22” author: “Mark Neal”
Season by season, the Chesapeake crab catch is shrinking. Through the 1980s and early ’90s, commercial harvests averaged nearly 90 million pounds, including a banner haul of 113 million in 1993. The numbers since then don’t lie. Both 1998 and 1999 were about 30 percent below the levels of the ’80s, and 2000 was worse: 49 million pounds. Scientists are gloomy about this year, too. In the Maryland portion of the bay, where harvests once averaged 48 million pounds, some forecasts dip below 20 million. “The Chesapeake fishery is perilously close to collapse,” says William T. Goldsborough, director of the fisheries program at the Chesapeake Bay Foundation.
It’s been a long time since the Chesapeake was the “immense protein factory” H. L. Mencken called it, its waters teeming with shad, sturgeon, oysters and herring. All fell prey to overfishing or environmental stress or both. As recently as the 1950s, Maryland and Virginia watermen landed more than 3 million bushels of oysters a year. Due to a devastating parasite infestation, last season’s catch was a tenth of that. The blue crab is now the bay’s last major commercial fishery, yielding about two thirds of all dockside revenues in Maryland. “And if the blue crab goes, where are we?” asks marine ecologist Anson Hines of the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center in Edgewater, Md. “The watermen don’t have any other place to go and still sustain their way of life.”
The crab crisis pits an industry against scientists in a battle reminiscent of the debate over global warming. The governments of Maryland and Virginia, supported by a consensus of scientists in both states, reluctantly concluded that in the short term, at least, overharvesting the blue crab caused the sudden population decline. Both states have taken steps that will cut into the watermen’s livelihood. In April, Virginia reduced the number of legal crabbing days. Last month Maryland cut the legal workday to eight hours, and will likely shorten the season by a month. The goal: to reduce the harvest by 15 percent by 2004, in hopes of doubling the spawning stock.
The watermen take this as a direct threat to both their incomes and their way of life. “The truth of the matter is, there’s no good science on crabs,” says Larry Simms, the president of the Maryland Watermen’s Association and a charter-boat skipper out of Rock Hall. The crab catch has always been volatile, he says; 1993’s record high was preceded by an abnormally lean year. “This whole thing is about public perception. The science is secondary.” It’s an article of faith among watermen that experience on the water trumps research methods. “The scientists, they’re nice people and all, they have their models,” says Abner. “But they have never seen what the waterman has seen.”
Crab science is in fact still in its adolescence. The knowledge gaps are huge. “There’s no good estimate of the number of blue crabs out there,” says Hines. “There’s no good data on crab mortality, or on reproductive capacity.” It’s not even clear how long a crab could live if left alone. What the scientists do know, though, is alarming. Study after study shows that the average size of crabs is decreasing, suggesting that they’re being caught younger. And there are fewer females in wintertime samples of dormant crab populations, a harbinger of low reproduction rates in spring. So what if crab science is incomplete? The prudent course is to act now by cutting the catch, argues Eric Schwaab, director of the fisheries service in Maryland’s Department of Natural Resources: “The traditional fisheries-management model is to wait until there’s a crisis… What we’re trying to do with crabs is act before nobody is deriving any economic value anymore.”
Restrictions on crabbing are at best a holding action, the watermen say. “They can’t regulate the crabs, so they regulate the crabber,” says Simms. They also can’t, in the short term, dispel the environmental stresses afflicting the Chesapeake. Air pollution infuses the bay with nitrogen, while fertilizer runoff from farms delivers nitrogen and phosphorus; both create deadly algae blooms. Siltation from property development prevents light from reaching sea grasses that act as both food source and shelter for larval crabs. Once blanketing more than 600,000 acres, sea grasses now cover only about 70,000. “We can try to increase the crab’s spawning stock,” admits Sarah Taylor-Rogers, Maryland’s secretary of Natural Resources. “But if the habitat isn’t there and the food stock isn’t there, it won’t make a whole lot of difference.”
Tougher pollution and siltation controls are already helping. Advances in the understanding of crab ecology would help, too. At the Smithsonian facility, Hines and colleagues are using “ultrasonic biotelemetry” to monitor crab behavior. They wire crabs’ carapaces and claws with switches and magnets to understand, for example, their feeding habits in various water conditions. They’re especially interested in what produces aggressive behavior: crabs can be cannibals. That’s one reason crab aquaculture is not an obvious solution, but Yonathan Zohar, director of the University of Maryland’s Center of Marine Biotechnology, believes it’s worth a try. At his lab, scientists have pregnant female crabs spawning in computer-controlled tanks where salinity, temperature and levels of dissolved oxygen correspond to the Chesapeake’s. The spawn grow to become crablets, then receive intensive feedings of pellets rich in protein and other nutrients to discourage cannibalism. Unlike a traditional hatchery that exposes hatchlings to every disease or toxic waste in the local water, Zohar’s is as pristine as can be. His assistants call it “condominium living, with caviar.” The result: a 60 percent survival rate of spawn, which Zohar hopes to release into the bay one day.
And Bobby Abner? In the end, his struggle to hang on is about more than a living. It’s about a folkway unique to the Chesapeake region, about men and women who do things the way they have always been done because it brings them closer to the elements. “Sometimes I get out in the middle of the bay and turn off my engine and do nothing,” says Abner. “Absolutely nothing. I might hear an osprey squeal or a fish jumping, but that’s all. I float. I love this bay. I love what I do, and I want to die on this bay.”
If his livelihood doesn’t die first.
