Despite Rescue Effort, Bay Crabs at an Ebb
Pollution, Warming and Overfishing Keep Population Numbers Down

By David A. Fahrenthold
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, November 17, 2007

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 R. 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."

The Chesapeake has a long roster of collapsed species, including many of its best-loved icons.

First, the sturgeon was mercilessly fished for meat and roe. Shad went next, netted and blocked off by dams. Oysters have been nearly wiped out by harvests and disease. Rockfish dropped off but then came back, the bay's best, but just about only, success story.

Through it all, the number of blue crabs held relatively steady, helped by their relatively high tolerance for dirty water and their astonishing fertility. A female crab can produce more than 6 million eggs a year, allowing the population to rebuild quickly.

But 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 -- an earlier point in the current slump -- 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."

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."

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, though 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. The reason: Crab catches have declined, but the total number of crabs has dropped even faster.

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 M. 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.

Watermen, however, reject the idea that they are behind the crab's decline. In their view, the problem is the polluted water and they are only the most convenient scapegoats.

"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.

Many human diners are also noticing a difference.

At Jimmy Cantler's Riverside Inn in Annapolis, a cathedral of hard-shell crabs, a bushel of big jimmies cost $225 this summer. The price has risen about 20 percent in the past few years, one employee said. This year's drought had a hand in that, because it made the water saltier, which made the crabs move to new spots. But the declining numbers also seem to have played a role.

It's difficult to predict what the future holds for the Chesapeake's crabs. Some scientists think they'll stay relatively steady at their current low levels. Others worry that a disaster such as a hurricane or a shellfish disease could wallop the bay, catching the population at a weak moment, and push their numbers down much further.

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."

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."