Despite Rescue Effort, Bay Crabs at an Ebb

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."

Some scientists have concluded that a major new limit on the crab harvest is needed. One popular suggestion is a permanent "sanctuary" to protect females along their migration route.

None of the proposals is close to approval, though both states say they are planning how they should respond to the problem.

The idea of a large crab sanctuary, in particular, is likely to draw strong opposition from watermen. The reason was obvious one recent afternoon at the H. Glenwood Evans and Son seafood company in Crisfield.

As waterman Robbie Tyler pulled up to the dock with his day's catch of crabs, a dockworker yelled to him in the lower Eastern Shore accent that makes crabs into cray-abs.

" Batter, right?" the dockworker yelled. " Batter?"

"Better today," Tyler agreed.

And female crabs were the reason. Their distinctive red-tipped claws poked out between the slats of Tyler's bushels. The females had migrated dozens of miles south to the southern end of the bay to spawn, and their journey had led them right to Tyler's traps.

Tyler, 31, said he couldn't make ends meet if these crabs were protected by a sanctuary.

Already, he said, "we're right on the edge now of not being able to do this."

But scientists wonder whether the crabs themselves are on the edge. In pressing for change -- in the crab harvest and in the bay itself -- they say the crab is starting to follow the downward trajectory of other Chesapeake animals.

"The fact is that this is a serious decline, and it's showing the same patterns" as the earlier collapses of shad, oysters and rockfish, said Anson "Tuck" Hines of the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center in Edgewater, Md. "The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different outcome."