Whither the Blue Crab? By John Lang

Are the blue crabs of the Chesapeake going the way of the oysters, the shad and the herring? Once Maryland could joke if there were any more crabs in the bay they’d have to be smaller. And now where are they?

No one can say exactly how many of the bottom-crawling crustaceans there are surviving down there in the murk and the muck. What’s become evident to everybody trying to pull them up, though, is how many there aren’t.

“I’ve never seen it this bad,” says Capt. Andy McCown of the Echo Hill Outdoor School. McCown points to a pound-netter on the Chester River who could haul up to six bushels of crabs in good times but caught less than two dozen the other day. He cites a crabber on Eastern Bay who set five lines and by day’s end had snagged just two crabs. Because of scarcity crab prices have soared. By late summer, the cost of a bushel of No. 1s had peaked at $240.

In July, outdoors writers for both The Washington Post and The Baltimore Sun called for an immediate bay-wide moratorium on commercial and recreational crabbing. The Sun’s Dan Rodricks noted the estimated crab population of under 300 million is close to 1995’s, which was termed “perilously close to collapse,” and to 2008’s when, at the urging of the governor, the crab fishery was declared a federal disaster. Rodricks observed that last year’s harvest of 19 million pounds was the lowest on record. Angus Phillips of the Post noted that Canada geese, rockfish and yellow perch all made dramatic comebacks after moratoriums – “and the time has come to stop pussyfooting around and shut down crabbing for a few years.”

Their demands went down like two journalists in a bar full of watermen.

 

As fall came on there was no clamor for a moratorium – not from the state, not by biologists studying the bay, certainly not by Maryland’s huge hardshell industry. After all it was only two springs ago that Gov. Martin O’Malley stood on a dock, behind a full bushel of steamed crabs and in front of a full catch of cameras,  declaring crab populations at a 19-year high and urging everyone to eat more of  them.

Then the very next winter survey showed crab numbers plunging 60 percent – from  an estimated 765 million to 300 million. “But there’s no reason to panic,” said John Bull of the Virginia Marine Resources Commission, because, he explained, female crabs had increased from 95 million to 147 million. But uh-oh. Only 69 million female crabs turned up on the very next survey done this past winter. That’s below the number science has determined necessary to sustain the population. And crabbers on the upper bay haven’t been finding juveniles, either. McCown, who takes school children on expeditions aboard Echo Hill’s skipjack The Elsworth, reports, “A couple years ago little crabs were there in numbers I’ve not seen. Then, just gone.”

Estimates are only that and sometimes miss the mark. But an empty pot is indisputable. Many causes are suspected. It’s overharvesting. It’s die-offs from severe winters. It’s pollution, agricultural runoff, municipal discharges, algae blooms. It’s red drum, and it’s rockfish gobbling up baby crabs and the females as soon as they shed. It’s the state overprotecting the too-many and insatiable stripers.

This summer two studies made waves up and down the bay. At the Virginia Institute of Marine Sciences, professor Jeff Shields reported on a parasite called Hematodinium that infects crabs in high salinity waters and kills them all within 40 days.  He found up to 80 percent of juveniles are infected.

While Hematodinium is found only in salty southern waters of the Chesapeake, a virus known as RLV is turning up wherever scientists look. First identified in the 1970s, RLV popped up again, reported Eric Schott of University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science, “when we began investigating an unexplained mortality in soft shells.” Scientists then found the virus in many crabs dying in research hatcheries and labs.  Next they began looking for it in the wild and discovered RLV in about 20 percent of crabs taken along the Atlantic Coast from Massachusetts to Virginia. “In captivity if they have the virus they die. But in the wild there are different stresses, a very different environment,” Schott explains. Researchers cannot monitor a crab life-long at the bottom of the bay – so they can suspect RLV of causing die-offs in the wild but can’t state it as scientific fact.

Where scientists will equivocate, watermen won’t. They know what they’re seeing, no doubts about it.

On the Chester

It’s the last day of July and the last pound-netter to work the middle reaches of the Chester pilots his workboat upriver from his anchorage at Quaker Neck Landing. It’s a day everybody’d want to be a waterman: temperature in the 70s, low humidity, steady breeze making sparkles far as eyes can see, the sky going blue as lost love. Dickie Manning Jr., has been doing this for 30 years, grew up on the river in fact, watched it change and never for better. “No grasses in the Chester. If there’s no place for crabs to hide, something will eat them. Everything eats crab.” He nods his head toward the landing: “I was a boy, I took swimming lessons there, in a patch of water where the grasses had been cut out. And you couldn’t swim out of it because the grasses all around it were so thick. There’s no grasses now.”

As his Margaret Ann chugs past Southeast Creek, Manning observes, “No lily pads either.” It used to be, he explains, that tributaries to the Chester had lily pads growing densely along the banks, leaving only a channel of open water. He remembers the Chester had beds of them. “Crabs hid in the lily pads. There’s no hiding places now.”

Manning’s sure of what killed the grasses and lily pads: pollution from agricultural runoff and municipal sewage lagoons, which he ticks off one by one: “Millington, Crumpton, Kennedyville, Chestertown, Church Hill, Centreville, Rock Hall, Grasonville and Kent Island.” Later, Chestertown zoning administrator Kees de Mooy counters that the town’s nutrient removal system installed in 2007 cut nitrogen and phosphorus discharges down to a level of what went into the river in the 1700s, when the town’s population was 400. Manning doesn’t dispute the improvements in filtering, just that, “I count nine lagoons discharging into the Chester. That’s a lot of lagoons for a little river.”

Manning’s older son Ryan started this season trot-lining but caught so few crabs he gave it up and went to work the pound nets with his dad. This morning he tried to go back to his lines but found his workboat’s hydraulics leaking and lost the day getting it fixed. Manning has his younger boy Logan helping him today. Pound nets – the Mannings work a dozen of them from above the mouth of the Chester to just below the Chester River Yacht & Country Club – consist of a single file of poles reaching out from shore, holding a net perpendicular to the current. This net directs fish to deeper water and to another net where they are trapped. By tugging lines running beneath this net, the Mannings lift the fish up close to the Margaret Ann.

To a waterman, the catch is as pretty as a mound of money. Again and again, Logan plunges a big dipper into the living glop and swings about 30 pounds of it onboard,  where his father sorts and discards. Yellow perch are flipped into this box, mud shad to that box, catfish in another, stripers go into a cooler, crabs to a basket. Eels, carp, undersized rockfish and dead and diseased horrors are scraped overboard to sink, drift on or swim away. By 10:30, the workboat is back at Quaker Neck Landing with a fair day’s haul of fish. But there’s just a bushel and a half of crabs, which Manning says is “about average” nowadays.

Moratorium?

Times sure changed. Waterman Clay Larrimore, who takes out crabbing charters, says, “The crabbing is the worst I’ve seen in my life.” Twenty-five years ago Larrimore trot-lined for crabs on the Chester and says he averaged 15 to 20 bushels a day. Today, on his charters, he limits his parties to two bushels and never keeps the females. “I think they definitely have to cut back on taking female crabs,” Larrimore says. “If you want more deer, stop shooting does. We have to put a moratorium on female crabs.”

A moratorium on crabbing would have enormous economic and political consequences, pinching not only watermen, but also buyers, pickers, restaurateurs, chefs, waiters, busboys, bankers, Realtors, really almost everyone who lives and works in communities around the bay.

That’s a key point made by DNR’s Glenn Davis, “the blue crab statistics guru,” in an interview with The Sun’s Dan Rodricks. Davis argues the short lifespan of crabs means a moratorium for them wouldn’t work as it did for the longer-lived rockfish. He says colder-than-average winters typically result in mortalities of up to 50 percent in adult crabs. He says their natural mortality increases when crabs become more dense, because they are more available to predators and also cannibalistic. And, Davis notes that crabs are key to the $600 million Maryland seafood industry, so “the potential benefit of a moratorium, which is not guaranteed, simply does not offset the detrimental impact of a complete ban on harvest.”

Up to this year, the dockside dollar value of crabs has ranged between $50 million and $60 million annually – and that comprises two-thirds of the worth of all the fish caught. With oysters down to one percent of historic populations, the beautiful swimmers are the iconic species of Maryland – crabs on license plates, crabs on decals colored like the state flag. To impose a moratorium would puncture the marketed myth of the Maryland Crab – although in truth that one has been leaking a long time.

“Sorry, Marylanders, Your Crab Is a Lie” taunted the headline last September in Slate online magazine. Writer Matthew Yglesias described watching truck after truck being loaded with crabs on the Gulf Coast for convoy to Maryland. “Crabs get shipped from far and wide to the Chesapeake area precisely because the Chesapeake has had crabs in it,” Yglesias wrote. He argued that the historically plentiful nature of Chesapeake crabs meant that, “over time, as the region’s population has grown, ferocious demand for crab has outstripped the local ecosystem’s sustainable level of crabbing.”

Moratorium or not, chances are high nowadays that the soft shell plated in a bayside crab shack is actually a sweetie bred and born in the Carolinas. And, anymore, the usual suspect in Maryland crab soup is some bottom-feeding lowlife dragged out of   a coastal bayou down in Louisiana.

And so it goes. Laissez les bon temps rouler, Hon.

Chestertown writer John Lang has reported for The Associated Press, Scripps Howard News Service, New York Post, U.S. News & World Report and The Washington Post. A former journalism instructor at Washington College, he edited two anthologies of essays, “Here on the Chester” and “Athey’s Field” by Literary House Press. He was also the founding managing editor of The Chestertown Spy. 

This article first appeared in Currents, the annual journal of Chester River Association, and is reprinted with permission.