Maryland Marine Notes: September-December 2000 Sidebar

Volume 18, Numbers 5-6 • September-December 2000

The Fluctuating Blue Crab Fishery

The summer of 2000 looks to be one of the worst on record for the Maryland blue crab fishery. According to Harley Spier of the Maryland Department of Natural Resources, Maryland crabbers hauled in only about 3.5 million pounds in July, and 2.9 million in August. This falls far below the five–year average for July and August, which is about 7.2 million pounds for each month. So far, according to Spier, Maryland crabbers have harvested a total of 15.3 million pounds for the year, and even with a good October and November it is not likely that they will come anywhere near the 38 million pound five–year average.

Following – much less predicting – the blue crab fishery is extremely difficult. Not only do stocks rise and fall depending on a range of factors, including climatic changes and shifts in the food web, but the fishery itself fluctuates, depending on economic and social factors, as well as crab stocks.

In order to gain as clear a picture as possible, resource managers and researchers rely on carefully controlled monitoring efforts, where they examine the same areas in the same ways year after year, or employ specially designed random sampling surveys. The newest and increasingly the most important of these monitoring efforts is the winter dredge survey, until recently funded by the Federal government (through the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) but now supported by the states of Maryland and Virginia. The survey shows that Bay crab stocks at the end of the 1990s have declined, hovering just above the historical low–point of 1968.

Now it appears that the commercial harvest may be tracking with the fisheries-independent surveys. Although dismal news, it should perhaps not come as too much of a surprise, since the harvest has tracked fairly well with the monitoring surveys for the last several decades.

In decades past, the crab has always rebounded, often quite quickly. Watermen and researchers alike are hoping that this will happen again – and current recommendations for a fishing threshold are meant to ensure that stocks do not drop so low that they can't bounce back.

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