Watermen Inflated 2008 Crab Harvest Figures, Md. Alleges

Error Unintended, Group Says

Maryland watermen inflated the number of blue crabs they reported catching last year, when it appeared a larger harvest might have led to less restrictive limits on their catch in future seasons, state regulators said yesterday.

Logs submitted by about 6,000 watermen seemed to indicate that the harvest of female crabs rose by about 14 percent last year, officials at the Maryland Department of Natural Resources said. That was unexpected: Last year, Maryland and Virginia clamped down on the harvest of females, hoping they might spawn and rebuild the Chesapeake Bay's depleted crab population.

But yesterday, state officials said those numbers were far too high.

After checking with seafood dealers and taking their own counts of the crab pots set in the Chesapeake, Maryland scientists determined that the actual commercial harvest of females had fallen. The harvest was at least 25 percent below what would have been expected without the new regulations.

State officials said the discrepancy was probably caused by watermen overstating what they'd caught. One likely reason, they said, was that some thought the state would use the catch from 2008 to set future limits on crabbing -- that a big catch last year would lead to a higher quota later.

"This isn't unpredictable, and . . . I'd argue it's human nature," said Gina Hunt, deputy director of the Maryland Fisheries Service. "We're not casting stones at this point."

Larry Simns, president of the Maryland Watermen's Association, said yesterday that the problem stemmed from watermen's confusion about filling out the state forms, not from an intent to deceive.

Last year, the state set new limits on the number of female crabs each waterman could take and banned the catching of females during the last seven weeks of the season. There was no way to stop female crabs from entering the pots, which are set on the bottom of the Chesapeake, but watermen were instructed to throw them back.

Simns said his association had instructed watermen to somehow record the crabs they had caught but thrown back. He said the aim was to show that, contrary to scientists' belief, the bay still has many crabs.

But, Simns said, many watermen were unsure how to do that, and some tallied the crabs they had thrown back with those they kept.

"The form says 'caught.' It doesn't say [sold]," he said. "They aren't paper pushers to start with."

Lynn Fegley, a state Natural Resources official, said that this might have been part of the problem but that it was not enough to explain such a large increase in reported catches.

If anyone was trying to game the system, it didn't work. The state did not rely on 2008 figures to set future crabbing limits. Instead, it parceled out catch limits based on how much fishing equipment watermen were licensed to use.

Virginia officials had no such trouble. Reports from watermen and the state's surveys of seafood dealers showed the same results: A drop in the harvest of female crabs, which state officials estimated at 37 percent.

Rob O'Reilly, an official with the Virginia Marine Resources Commission, said one possible reason was that state officials announced early in the crab season that they did not intend to use 2008 data in parceling out future crab quotas. They relied, instead, on data from 2004 to 2007.