Crab Restoration Project Loses Funding

A University of Maryland project that mass-produced blue crabs in hatcheries -- raising hopes that the Chesapeake Bay's dwindled crab population could be replenished with human help -- has lost a crucial source of federal funding, a project leader said yesterday.

The hatchery project, which has released hundreds of thousands of tiny crabs into the Chesapeake, relied heavily on multimillion-dollar federal grants. But those grants were left out of the federal omnibus spending bill that President Bush signed in December, according to Yonathan Zohar, director of the university's Center of Marine Biotechnology.

Zohar said the project, which received about $3.6 million in federal funds last year, would not shut down immediately. It still has federal funding through the end of this year, he said.

But he said more is needed before the project can reach its ultimate goal: releasing more than a million crustaceans every year, enough to measurably bump up the bay's struggling stock of crabs.

"The project is not ready to deliver on its investment," said Zohar, whose center is part of the University of Maryland Biotechnology Institute. He continued: "It's in danger. . . . But I'm determined to find a way to make it happen."

The loss in funding was reported yesterday by the Baltimore Sun. Melissa Schwartz, a spokeswoman for Sen. Barbara A. Mikulski (D-Md.), said the crab project was left out as legislators sought to cut down on "earmarks" -- measures that target federal money for specific local projects.

Schwartz said researchers had received at least $12.7 million since 2002. She said the federal money was intended to get the program off the ground but not to run it year after year.

"Earmarks are not forever," Schwartz said. "It's time to find some new source of income."

The crab-hatchery project -- run by Zohar's center with a group of Chesapeake watermen, the Smithsonian Institution and universities in Virginia, North Carolina and Mississippi -- was touted as one of the first of its kind in the world. The scientists are able to hatch crab eggs and grow them from microscopic hatchlings to dime-size juveniles at hatcheries in Baltimore and St. Mary's County.

Zohar said he hoped to vastly increase the scale of the project, which released 215,000 crabs last year, and eventually turn the technology over to groups of watermen. But he said the loss of the federal money, which accounted for about 90 percent of the project's funding, would slow that work.

To finish the project on schedule, he said, researchers would need at least $4 million a year for at least two more years. Zohar said he was seeking to replace the lost funding with grants from state governments or other federal programs.