Clawing for Life

Facing disaster, two governors act to save the Chesapeake Bay's crabs.

THE MOMENT that Chesapeake Bay watermen had been dreading arrived Tuesday. Faced with a dire drop in the blue crab harvest, the governors of Maryland and Virginia announced sharp new limits on the volume of sooks (as female crabs, the ones generally used to make crab cakes, are known) that can be taken from the bay's waters. The new rules mean that inevitably, and through little fault of their own, some watermen will be driven out of business and out of the only way of life they have known.

The governors, Timothy M. Kaine of Virginia and Martin O'Malley of Maryland, had little choice. Had they not acted, the crab population, already imperiled, was at risk of going the way of the bay's oyster fishery, which has all but disappeared. Although crabs are often thought of as a hardy species, they have proven no match for the bay's climbing temperatures, soaring nitrogen levels caused by suburban and farm runoff, rampaging algae clouds, and drastically depleted underwater vegetation, which has deprived baby crabs of their natural protection and habitat. The result, as summarized in the governors' joint statement, is that "crab populations are down 70 percent from 1990 levels and are showing no signs of recovery. . . ."

The governors are ordering state agencies to cut the harvest of female blue crabs this year by a third. That's fine as far as it goes; last year, watermen caught an estimated 60 percent of the crabs in the bay, far in excess of the 46 percent goal the states had set some years ago as a means of sustaining the fishery. But it is really more of a stopgap designed to avert utter catastrophe than a lasting solution. Assuming no dramatic foreseeable improvement in the bay's ecology, the states must do what they have pointedly failed to so far: Devise a long-term strategy for the revival of the crab population.

Scientists, particularly those at the Chesapeake Bay Foundation, and some officials have considered various means of doing that, only to be undercut by lawmakers in both states, who cut off modest funding for studies. Part of the problem may have been competition or a lack of coordination between the two states; part of it may have been political cold feet by politicians loath to deliver bad news to the bay's 1,000 watermen and the thousands of others whose jobs depend on the crab harvest. But muddling through is no longer an option; to do so could mean extinction for a fishery that is synonymous with the Chesapeake Bay.