Despite Rescue Effort, Bay Crabs at an Ebb

"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."

And 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 drop in young crabs -- the animals usually live up to three years -- has been obvious to Virginia researchers this summer, as they do a kind of aquatic population survey called Big Suck III.

One recent day, a group of them puttered into the Little Annemessex River, off the Eastern Shore seafood capital of Crisfield, Md., and used a kind of superpowered vacuum to suck tiny creatures off the bottom. Then they picked out dime- and nickel-size baby crabs.

So far this year, researcher Rom Lipcius said, they have found one-tenth or less the number of baby crabs they found in Big Suck I, in 1994 and 1995.

"This is really the first signal: If the entire population were to collapse, we would see it here," because these crabs will be the next generation of adults, said Lipcius, of the Virginia Institute of Marine Science. "And, in fact, we're not finding that many."

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, 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."