Winter Mortality of Chesapeake Blue Crabs,Callinectes sapidusHow many blue crabs will be around next spring and summer? That question has bedeviled watermen and crab lovers and scientists for a century or more. The best guesses now come from a winter survey that sends scientists out with dredges every year to scrape up hibernating blue crabs buried in the mud at the bottom of the bay. The winter crab counts they come up with are helpful in forecasting spring and summer populations. The goal of this project is to sharpen the accuracy of these estimates. The working hypothesis is that cold winters kill more crabs than mild winters. That's a claim watermen have made for years, but now scientists will also be investigating a series of more complicated claims. Crabs, they suspect, may survive short spells of extreme cold, but succumb to longer spans of moderate cold. The cumulative dose of cold days could be a major crab killer, making long winters more lethal than shorter, colder seasons. Another killer could be the combination of cold temperatures linked with low salinity. Five scientists at three institutions will be collaborating to test these and other hypotheses. They will be collecting field field data, setting up laboratory experiments and refining mathematical approaches that can be used to improve blue crab population predictions. Their results should help resource managers set targets for commercial and recreational crabbing that will maintain a sustainable fishery and avoid overfishing and collapse of blue crab stocks in the Chesapeake. |
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2002
Anson Hines Smithsonian Environmental Research Center Victor S. Kennedy Bill Van Heukelem Horn Point Laboratory University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science Tom Miller Chesapeake Biological Laboratory University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science Glenn R. Davis Maryland Department of Natural Resources 2003-2004 Anson Hines Smithsonian Environmental Research Center Victor S. Kennedy Horn Point Laboratory University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science Tom Miller Chesapeake Biological Laboratory University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science |
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