“You can expect to see the price of a bushel of crabs be extremely high. “If you want a July 4 picnic with fresh blue crabs, you’re going to have to think about ordering beforehand,” said Miller, adding that the Bay’s prized crustacean will also be harder to get. “So, culturally, blue crabs have a central place in the identity of Maryland as a state and Baltimore as a city.” They fished for striped bass in the spring, and for crabs in summer and autumn,” he said. “Historically, the fishing community in Baltimore fished for oysters in the winter. Three species that live in the Bay, he said, are iconic to Baltimore: oysters, striped bass or rockfish, and blue crabs. It prompted the fisheries managers and regulators across Maryland and Virginia to impose restrictions on commercial harvesting and place a moratorium on crabbing licenses to stabilize the falling blue crab numbers.įor Miller, the falling crab numbers are significant for cultural reasons as well as economic and scientific ones. The last time the blue crab population dipped to a troubling low was in 2001, with an estimated 254 million crabs across the Bay. Virginia netted close to $28 million from the commercial harvest in 2020 alone.ĭuring the 2020 crabbing season, 41.6 million pounds of blue crabs were harvested from the Bay and its tributaries, according to the 2021 Blue Crab Advisory Report from the Chesapeake Bay Stock Assessment Committee (CBSAC). Considered the most valuable commercial fishery in the Bay, the value of blue crab landings in Maryland is estimated to have hovered around $45 million annually for the past decade. The third factor is changes in the environment, such as reduced water quality and loss of habitat, among a number of other unknowns that can potentially contribute to the declining crab numbers.Ĭhesapeake Bay is the source of more than one-third of the total blue crab supply in the United States, according to the Chesapeake Bay Program, which tracks the bay’s signature species. The invasive fish-introduced decades ago in several Virginia rivers-has a ferocious appetite, and likely consumes a large number of blue crabs, Miller said. Predation is another important factor, especially by the blue catfish, which can grow up to 5 feet long and over 100 pounds. Credit: Kristen Zeis/Deep Indigo Collective for Inside Climate News Hudgins shows a blue crab he caught in the Chesapeake Bay in Mathews, Virginia, on Friday, June 10, 2022. The population has declined for female, male and juvenile crabs, with the number of adult male crabs also at an all-time low since the survey began. “All of the things that we appreciate with family and friends, it happens around a crab feast.”Ĭarried out jointly by Maryland’s department of Natural Resources and the Virginia Marine Resource Commission, the dredge survey released last month put the estimate for the Bay’s prized critter at 227 million-the lowest in the survey’s history. You pick crabs and spend an extended meal with wooden mallets and cold beer and tell jokes and reminisce,” said Thomas Miller, professor of fisheries science at the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science, who has been part of the survey team since its inception 33 years ago. And even the scientists who worked on the most recent winter dredge survey, which measures the population, grow wistful when they consider the colorful crustacean so central to Baltimore and Maryland culture. For a third straight year, the number of crabs in the Chesapeake Bay has dropped, this time to a record low.
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