MECHANICSVILLE - Nearly everyone in the social hall of this St. Mary's County firehouse agreed that the Chesapeake Bay blue crab population is in trouble. The question was, what to do about it. And there wasn't much agreement on that.
Crack down on recreational crabbers and enforce existing laws, some watermen said. Set commercial catch limits, said recreational crabbers, and ban taking female crabs.
The Bi-State Blue Crab Advisory Committee has taken its show on the road, holding public meetings in schools, council chambers and fire halls to seek feedback on proposals to ease the pressure on the bay's most economically important fishery.
Faced with steadily declining crab stocks, scientists have said the harvest must be cut by 15 percent to stave off a crash. Among the options are reducing the number of days or hours watermen can work, placing restrictions on the amount of gear they can use or quotas on their catch.
The blue crab panel, created by Maryland and Virginia, is halfway through a series of meetings in both states to hear what watermen, recreational crabbers, conservationists and others have to say. And while they have said a lot, they have agreed on little: licensing recreational crabbers, improving the health of the bay and easing limits on catching rockfish.
Rockfish, once on the verge of extinction in the bay, have made a stunning comeback and are preying on juvenile crabs, said the watermen, who argued that restrictions on rockfish catches should be eased. Forty-seven percent of the rockfish caught in one study had an average of 21 small crabs in their stomachs, said Terry Conway, a seafood packer from Crisfield. But the author of the study, Jacque Van Monfrantz of the Virginia Institute of Marine Science, said that doesn't mean the comeback of the rockfish, also known as striped bass, has led to the decline of blue crabs.
His study focused on grass beds near the mouths of four Virginia rivers, nursery areas for juvenile crabs to congregate, he said. Rockfish "feed on whatever is most available," and in the grass beds, that's juvenile crabs.
"It's readily apparent that as striped bass increase, they eat more crabs. But peeler pots have doubled and effort has gone up in all the [crab] fisheries," he said. "It's natural to try to place blame elsewhere, but in reality I don't think that by reducing the striped bass population, you'll increase the blue crab population."
