Chesapeake Bay crabs on path to recovery

A powerful cold snap killed some 200 million crabs in the Chesapeake Bay last winter, mostly in Maryland waters, scientists reported Tuesday. Despite that, the Bay's crab population hit its second-highest mark since 1997 - proof, Virginia officials say, that their efforts at stirring a comeback of the prized blue crab are working.

"Clearly, we're on the right path," state Secretary of Natural Resources Doug Domenech said in a statement, "and this drop in crab abundance just means it will take a bit longer to completely rebuild the stock."

According to the annual Blue Crab Winter Dredge Survey, a collaborative field study between Virginia and Maryland scientists, the estimated Bay population in 2010-11 was 463 million crabs - down 30 percent from the previous year.

However, it still was nearly double the record low set in 2007 and was strong enough to support the biggest harvest of crabs Baywide since 1993, according to state statistics.

The annual survey takes place at 1,500 locations throughout the Bay from December through February. Scientists grab muddy samples at each site, counting the number of crabs in each, then estimating a Baywide population.

Virginia opened its yearly crabbing season last month under many of the same strict rules that were first imposed in 2008 by the state Marine Resources Commission, following the near-collapse in 2007.

At the time, then-Gov. Timothy M. Kaine and his Maryland counterpart, Gov. Martin O'Malley, both Democrats, enacted regulations designed to increase by 34 percent the number of adult female crabs in the Bay.

The moves worked, though the regulations were so onerous that the federal government declared the Bay crab fishery a national disaster.

Since then, significant strides have been made in restoring crab stocks, but state officials are not ready to relax regulations on commercial fishermen this year or likely for the foreseeable future.

John Bull, a spokesman for the state marine commission, said the panel will meet next week in Newport News to vote on "two relatively minor tweaks" to crabbing rules for the 2011 season, which runs from mid-March to November.

Environmental groups are applauding this cautious approach.

"Mother Nature is telling us that even our hardiest Bay creature still needs a helping hand, so we must stay the course," Bill Goldsborough, a fisheries scientist with the Chesapeake Bay Foundation, said in a statement.

A state decision on whether to keep the winter crabbing season closed, as has been the case for the past three years, will be made after more scientific data are published in the months ahead, Bull said. Scientists in Virginia and Maryland attribute the population rebounds in recent years to the winter closure.

Before then, the winter fishery operated for more than a century in the lower Bay, off Norfolk, Virginia Beach and the Eastern Shore. From December through February, watermen would scrape muddy bottom with steel rakes, or dredges, collecting millions of hibernating female crabs before they could give birth in the spring.