![]() Watermen in various parts of the Bay did report seeing large numbers of small crabs. Last year’s survey found that the male population had decreased by 23%, so that, she suggested, could help explain lower early harvests. The adult male crabs that were large enough to be harvested through the first half of the season are a “carry-over from last year,” McClair said. This year, said Genine McClair, the DNR crab program manager, “Considering what the survey said, we would expect to have a pretty decent year.”īut she said there are a number of reasons why the harvest had been so spotty around the Bay through the first half of the season.įirst of all, she noted, while the winter survey did find an abundance of crabs, 60% of them were juveniles - too small to be legally harvested until late this season or possibly next year, depending on how fast they grow. In the 2017–18 survey, for example, scientists saw an 18% decline in overall abundance, but the Baywide commercial harvest in the summer of 2018 hit 55 million pounds, slightly better than 2017. And sometimes, the survey and harvest diverge. But finding a lot of crabs over the winter doesn’t mean there’ll be plenty when people want them, or that prices will drop. In early July, for instance, an email to reporters from the Chesapeake Bay Program about a scientific status report on crabs carried a subject line stating “there’s 60% more crabs to eat over the Fourth of July,” even though the report itself didn’t make such a prediction.Īs a result, the public - and watermen - looked for a bountiful blue crab season that didn’t play out the way they expected it to.įisheries scientists say the survey has generally been a reliable indicator of how that year’s harvest will go. Fisheries managers have used it to adjust crabbing regulations annually to ensure a sustainable harvest.īut the survey’s findings are often treated by the news media as a forecast of the crabbing season just starting, and agency press releases at times have hyped results that way. Experts consider the survey a highly reliable year-to-year gauge of the Chesapeake’s crab population. Maryland and Virginia have been running a winter survey since 1990, jointly dredging 1,500 sites around the Bay to see how many crabs they can find buried in the mud when cold weather renders them immobile. Others say the problem isn’t with the survey, but in how the findings are portrayed to the public. The seeming disconnect between the survey results and the first half of the harvest season has reinforced some watermen’s skepticism about the reliability of fisheries science. While Virginia watermen were said to be pulling in more crabs than last year, some Maryland watermen were left struggling during spring and summer holidays trying to explain to frustrated customers why they couldn’t find the crab bounty that scientists had described. A winter survey by Maryland and Virginia scientists released in early May did find the Bay’s crab population had soared 60% over the previous year - to an estimated 594 million crabs, the highest number since 2012.īut the strong growth in the Bay’s crab population seen in the winter survey was no guarantee that there would be higher harvests everywhere in the Bay, and there weren’t - at least not through the first half of the commercial crabbing season. The TV stations weren’t reporting fake news. Though his catch was starting to improve by mid-July, Rice, who crabs in the Potomac River, said the first half of the season had been so bad that he’d begun working fewer pots because there were so few crabs to be found in them. “In 43 years of crab potting, this has been the worst I’ve seen,” Charles County waterman Billy Rice complained shortly after the holiday weekend. While supplies were generally ample in the Lower Bay through spring into summer, crabbers in other places had a hard time finding enough of the crustaceans to satisfy their crab-craving customers. ![]() Someone apparently forgot to tell the crabs, at least in the Upper Bay. “The survey is in,” echoed WMAR, another Baltimore station, “and it comes with great news for Maryland crab lovers!” At the beginning of July, media across Maryland delivered good news for those planning a traditional feast of Chesapeake Bay blue crabs on Independence Day.īaltimore TV station WJZ, for instance, touted a new report that the Bay’s crab population had increased 60% percent since 2018 - “meaning you can dig into 60% more crabs over Fourth of July weekend!” the station enthused.
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