Small Environmental Successes Stir Hope for Chesapeake Bay

"We were seeing like we saw in the '80s and '90s," Crockett said of the spring run. "The male crabs we've been catching this year are the biggest and the prettiest I've ever seen. And they taste awesome."

Crockett, who calls himself "the ultimate optimist," says the boom is part of a long population surge. But Jack Travelstead, chief of fisheries management at the Virginia Marine Resources Commission, is less sure.

"It's probably something to do with weather patterns, just a small trickle of crabs that reached the right size at the right time," he said. "I don't think it's a signal that the population is orders of magnitude larger than what we've seen."

The most reliable count of the bay's crab population is the winter dredge survey, which this year indicated that while the count is up from the 16-year-old survey's lowest levels, recorded in the early 1990s and 2000, it was slightly below last year's.

"My belief right now is that the surge this spring was short-lived," said Rom Lipcius, professor of marine science at the Virginia Institute of Marine Science in Gloucester Point, Va. Lipcius hypothesized that the crab boom originated with warmer weather last year that caused the creatures to grow faster and enter the fishery in greater numbers.

But the same temperature surge decimated large swaths of eelgrass, a favored nursery habitat for crabs. The warm water caused entire beds of eelgrass to defoliate, and they have yet to recover. Another temperature surge this year could damage them beyond repair.

"The eelgrass impact could be felt late this year or early next," Lipcius said. He isn't sure that will happen, but it makes the crab glut "a story where there's good and bad."

Shad on the Rebound

Each spring for more than a decade, Jim Cummins, director of living resources at the Interstate Commission on the Potomac River Basin, waits in the moonlight for the shad to return home to the Potomac from the Atlantic Ocean to spawn. He catches them, mixes eggs with milt, or sperm, in a big commercial mixing bowl, then transports the fertilized eggs to a Virginia hatchery. After about a month, he releases the fry into the Potomac. A memory of the river is imprinted on them as they swim for the Atlantic, ensuring that in about five years, the cycle will begin anew.

"They were once the most abundant and commercially important, and I argue they were once the most ecologically important, species in the bay," Cummins said. The shad is a "clockspring" species, he says, a fish that from egg to adult supports the entire ecosystem including, at one time, man.

Silvery, plentiful and nutritious, the Potomac's American shad were so important to the colonial economy that they've been dubbed the Founding Fish. Washington's first traffic jams, Cummins has read, were caused by wagon loads of the herring-type fish being rushed to markets as far away as Ohio.

But by the 1980s, shad were so severely overfished that a whole generation grew up never having tasted one. A two-decade moratorium was imposed, and biologists labored to restore the species throughout the watershed.

Today, the Potomac River's American shad population is about eight times the high counts recorded in the 1950s. Potomac eggs supply restoration programs from the Susquehanna to the Rappahannock.

Success would not have been possible, Cummins said, without improved sewage treatment, grass restoration and the moratorium.

Fishing the Potomac near Mount Vernon after dark, Cummins thinks of George Washington's day, when the river ran silver with fish streaking back home to deliver another generation. "The moon would shine on them," he said.

"These are things we've forgotten. But it's ready to spring back, and soon there will be more shad than anybody who's alive has seen."