As part of an effort to bolster the Chesapeake Bay's diminishing blue crab population, Sen. Barbara A. Mikulski is seeking $2 million in federal funds for research that could lead to a string of crab hatcheries around the bay.
But some bay scientists doubt whether the effort is worth the money.
"This will confuse the public and give watermen a false sense of optimism," said Don Boesch, president of the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science in Cambridge.
Mikulski, a member of the Senate Appropriations Committee, will announce the plan at a news conference Monday at the Center of Marine Biotechnology in downtown Baltimore.
"I'm making a request for $2 million in the Commerce Department budget, and I'm confident that if we don't get all of it, we'll come close to it," she said yesterday.
The money would go to a project at the marine center in which scientists are raising crabs in huge blue tanks in the basement of the Columbus Center. The crabs will be released into the bay to be studied.
The state, Phillips Seafood Restaurants and the Maryland Watermen's Association have contributed seed money to the project, which is based on a similar one in Japan. Scientists in that country annually release 50 million to 60 million juvenile swimming crabs into the Seto Island Sea. Juvenile swimming crabs are close relatives of the Atlantic blue crab.
Watermen's Association President Larry Simns said the hatcheries, combined with the restoration of the grass beds that serve as nurseries for juvenile crabs, are "our only salvation."
Boesch, whose Cambridge lab is one of the state's most noted bay science research centers, isn't so sure. The data from the Japanese program, which has been going on for 30 years, show "no relationship statistically between the number of crabs released and the number caught," he said.
Moreover, the Chesapeake Bay crab fishery is 10 times the size of Japan's. The hatcheries would have to release a billion crabs a year to get any increase in the population, Boesch said.
"You'd have to produce so many that it wouldn't be cost-effective," he said.
Bill Goldsborough, a senior scientist at the Chesapeake Bay Foundation, agreed that the hatchery project does not have a "lot of potential" for increasing the fishery. But he added that it could help increase knowledge of the blue crab.
"If you go in with the assumption that what you're going to get is an enhanced fishery, that would be shortsighted," he said. "But with the blue crab, there's a great need for learning information" and the research at COMB could provide that.
Marine center director Yonathan Zohar said he never claimed to have "the miracle solution to save the blue crab," but he wants to do more research.
"I just think research should be done," he said. "Through basic understanding there will be some progress made that will contribute to new approaches, new strategies to manage the blue crab."
The blue crab, which accounts for nearly half of Maryland watermen's commercial fishing income, has been in steady decline for the past 10 years, with last year's catch setting a record low.
The decline has led to efforts in Maryland and Virginia to stave off a population crash by cutting the annual harvest by 15 percent and doubling the spawning stock.
