Alarm Over Blue Crab Decline
O'Malley, Kaine Cite Evidence of Overfishing, Seek Cut in Harvest of Females

By David A. Fahrenthold
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, April 16, 2008

COLONIAL BEACH, Va., April 15 -- The governors of Virginia and Maryland pledged Tuesday to make a drastic cut in the harvest of Chesapeake Bay blue crabs, citing new data that show the struggling species continues to be heavily overfished.

Appearing on the banks of the Potomac River downstream of Washington, Govs. Timothy M. Kaine (D) and Martin O'Malley (D) said they had instructed state regulators to reduce the amount of female blue crabs caught this year by 34 percent.

Chesapeake watermen have said that kind of cut could make it impossible to stay in the business and devastate bayside villages where the best work is on the water.

But the governors said it was a necessary, if painful, step.

"The price of inaction is greater than the price of action," Virginia's Kaine said, because the watermen would be hurt more if populations of the bay's most famous crustacean were allowed to collapse. "We do not want to wake up in five or 10 years and realize we've lost this very important part of who we are."

The unusual joint appearance underscored how quickly, and how deeply, the blue crab's decline has come to worry the two states this year. Blue crabs thrived through decades of pollution and heavy fishing, but now they seem defeated by the bay's problems. The population has fallen about two-thirds since the early 1990s.

Maryland and Virginia had already proposed serious cutbacks in the harvest this year. Tuesday's announcement showed how far they are willing to go.

For years, the states have tried to preserve both the crabs and the watermen who harvest them -- another shrinking, romanticized Chesapeake breed and the heart of a $125 million regional industry.

Now, scientists say, in the short term it might be impossible to help them both.

"There has to be less fishermen" if there are to be more crabs, said Douglas Lipton, a resource economist at the University of Maryland. Otherwise, Lipton said, "the numbers just don't match up."

Tuesday was not the first time Maryland and Virginia have proposed cutting back on the harvest of female crabs, emphasizing the protection of females because they carry the eggs that can rebuild the population. "More moms, more babies," one Maryland official said.

But female crabs make up a significant portion of the harvest in the lower part of the bay, where they "run" in large numbers during annual migrations.

"You take 75 percent, you know, of your livelihood away, you've not got much left," said Roland Bradshaw, a waterman on the outpost of Smith Island, Md.

"That's all I know," said Bradshaw, president of the Tangier Sound Watermen's Association. "What else is there for me to do? I'm 56. I'm too old to learn anything else."

The fortunes of crabs and watermen have declined with the Chesapeake Bay, which is afflicted by murky waters, pollution-fueled algae blooms and shrinking beds of underwater grasses. H.L. Mencken called the bay an "immense protein factory," but one by one the estuary's most famous edible animals have declined. Only rockfish have been brought back, thanks to a moratorium on fishing imposed in the 1980s.

Since the early 1990s, it has been the crabs' turn to crash. There were about 852 million blue crabs in the bay in 1993, but by this winter the number had fallen to about 280 million, according to government surveys.

The reasons for the crash include the algae blooms, which consume oxygen the crabs need to breathe, and the lost grasses, which had sheltered young crabs from predators and which are thought to have succumbed to climate change.

Government officials say watermen are also part of the problem.

In 2001, both states tried to limit the crab catch, with new rules about when watermen could work and the minimum size of crabs they could keep. But officials say it hasn't worked. In seven of the last 10 years, watermen have still taken too much of the bay's population, according to data the two states released Tuesday. Last year, they caught about 60 percent of all the adult crabs in the bay -- when anything more than 53 percent is considered unhealthy, state officials say.

So, the governors said, the first step in saving the crabs -- and the watermen -- must be reducing the watermen's catch.

Before Tuesday's announcement, the two states had begun to look for ways to reduce the blue crab harvest. In Virginia, officials are considering a plan that would cut the number of crab traps each waterman is allowed to set out and prohibit the practice of dredging crabs from their winter burrows in the bay floor.

In Maryland, officials last week suggested barring watermen from catching female crabs during certain months and limiting the harvest of females in the others. Tuesday's announcement does not make anything final: Both states must approve regulations to achieve the 34 percent reduction in females caught.

"What will happen to their livelihood if we fail to take any action? And that's really the point at which we've arrived," O'Malley said Tuesday. He said the state would look for ways to support the watermen in the meantime, perhaps paying them to perform research or bay-restoration work. Neither governor offered estimates of how the crab restrictions would affect the industry.

But watermen said they are being made scapegoats. They said a larger responsibility lies with the federal Environmental Protection Agency, whose cleanup efforts consistently fail to meet agency goals, and with residents of the watershed, who flush toilets, fertilize lawns and engage in other activities that end up polluting the bay.

"They try to make you think that it's overfishing, but it's not overfishing," said Ken Smith, who crabs on the Rappahannock River and is vice president of the Virginia Watermen's Association. "The problem is the Chesapeake."