Blue Crabs: Beautiful Savory Swimmers of the Chesapeake Bay

Abstract

Blue crabs have been an important economic and ecological species within Chesapeake Bay throughout history. They have been collected and consumed from the days of Captain John Smith in the 1600s to the present. They have a complex life cycle that includes many molts, a post-larval phase offshore of the Chesapeake Bay, and re-invasion of the Bay with post-larvae. Once thought of as “inexhaustible,” blue crabs have been targeted by many fisheries including a peeler fishery, trot line fishery, crab pot fishery, soft crab fishery, and a recreational fishery. This species serves as both predator and prey in the Bay’s food web. Predation and cannibalism are thought to account for most of the mortality of juvenile crabs. Blue crabs that survive an array of predators face their biggest challenge from humans, as fishing accounts for about 80% of mortality in large juvenile and adult crabs. The commercial fishery for blue crabs came into full swing in the mid nineteenth century, after the advent of ice for preserving the catch during transport. The growing crab industry of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries provided skilled jobs for African Americans, and immigrants from Ireland, Italy, and other places. Extracting the meat from hard-shell blue crabs is hard and tedious work, and women did and still do most of the picking. Crab catches continued to rise through 1915, with a dip in 1920, and subsequently rose again until they declined during World War II. The crab harvest again increased from 1945 through 1995, but worrisome declines in the Chesapeake Bay blue crab population occurred in the mid-1990s through 2007. Desperate management actions averted a crisis in 2008 when the governors of Virginia and Maryland called for a 34% reduction in the harvest of female crabs in 2008 compared to 2004–2007. Major management efforts in 2008 triggered recovery of the population above the threshold for sustainable exploitation, and the current population is considered healthy.