Distributors import crabs from Louisiana and Texas, he said, but those supplies are also down, creating a spike in prices. Russ Nave, director of operations at Henry’s Seafood, a retailer and wholesaler east of York, said sales of crabs have been down, mostly because of the price. The high price of crabs might be affecting the demand. The statistics don’t bear that out, but watermen, while they pay attention to forecasts and surveys, depend on the lessons of their own experiences, earned over the decades, to draw their own conclusions. Watermen – many of whom have been working in the bay for decades – acknowledge that, but they also believe that crab populations are cyclical, that crabs seem to come and go depending on the five-to-seven-year cycle. The soft-shell crabs are vulnerable to predators – rockfish, steelheads, blue catfish and other species – and the lack of cover leads to more of them becoming dinner for fish than becoming dinner for, well, humans. The grasses are an important habitat for the crabs, as they provide cover when they shed their hard shells to grow. Underwater fields of grass have been disappearing, partially a result of pollution that flows into the bay from the Susquehanna River watershed.
Scientists, for good reason, point to a number of factors. Why the blue crab population seems to be decreasing depends on who you ask. More troubling to scientists and waterman is the question of what to do about it.Ĭrabs, it turns out, are complicated critters. “Although juvenile population estimates can vary greatly from year to year,” said Chris Moore, senior regional ecoscientist for the Chesapeake Bay Foundation, said, “the 2022 results are the third year of below-average numbers in numbers in this segment of the population.” The number of juvenile crabs, according to the survey, has been declining for three years. More troubling, according to scientists who have studied the crab population, is the decline in the number of female and juvenile crabs. Since 2019, the survey has found declining populations, from 594 million that year to 405 million the next year and 282 million in 2021.
The high-water mark in this century came in 2012, when the survey concluded that there were 765 million crabs in the watershed. Since then, though, the estimates, taking fluctuations into account, have been declining. But in 1993, it rebounded to 852 million. In 1992, though, that dropped to 367 million. The peak, according to the survey, was in 1991, when the survey estimated the population at 828 million.
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