A pioneering research project to boost the dwindling numbers of juvenile crabs in the Chesapeake Bay has lost its federal funding, leaving the program's future in doubt.
Since 2002, the Center of Marine Biotechnology at the Inner Harbor has received $15 million in earmarked federal funds to conduct research on the life cycle of the blue crab, then put young crabs in the bay to see how they live and where they migrate. In the omnibus spending bill signed by President Bush, the project's appropriation was slashed from nearly $4 million in 2007 to zero in 2008.
"We were all surprised that such a program that delivered so much on the investment was cut," said Yonathan Zohar, the center's director and the crab project's leader. "There is no other way to conduct this type of program other than to get this type of federal funding. ... And for the blue crab, it was so well- deserved because we wanted to do something before it was too late."
Zohar said he has enough money to continue the research until the end of this year and in the meantime will seek other funding. If he doesn't find it, Zohar said, he will have to lay people off. The federal grant pays at least part of the salaries of two dozen scientists at the center, as well as for researchers in Virginia, North Carolina and Mississippi. Most of the money has stayed in Maryland and is shared between Zohar's lab and the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center, in Edgewater.
The project is regarded as important by bay advocates because the researchers were able for the first time to raise large numbers of blue crabs in a hatchery, then map their migration patterns in the bay. The hope was that the work would help state officials better protect the bay's diminishing crab population.
The funding cuts come a few months after the Maryland Department of Natural Resources announced that the bay's blue crabs - one of the state's last productive fisheries - are in danger of being overfished.
Last year's winter-dredge survey found the second-lowest number of juvenile crabs in the bay since the state began counting, in 1989. Crab harvests have fallen sharply in recent years, from 48 million pounds in 1991 to 28 million pounds a year ago.
Sen. Barbara A. Mikulski, a Maryland Democrat who sits on the Appropriations Committee, had secured an earmark for the crab project for the past six years. Mikulski declined to speak specifically about the project, but through her press office issued a statement that suggested she might not have requested funding for 2008.
