by Diane Tennant
photography by Eric Lusher
Your future entree is, at this moment, looking for trouble. The fact it is still alive and sidling along the bottom of the Chesapeake Bay is pretty remarkable, given that the blue crab could sing right along with Annie about its hard-knock life.
Rotten smelly life!
Full of sorrow life!
No tomorrow life!
No wonder crabs are aggressive, threatening with open pincers, spoiling for a fight. Everything eats them. Polluted water suffocates them. The underwater grass where they hide is in decline. On top of that, winter can freeze them, and they’re cannibals.
Then there’s us. In 2013, 37 million pounds of blue crab were harvested commercially in the Chesapeake. It takes about three crabs to make a pound, so about 111 million blue crabs had no tomorrow that year.
They were delicious.
The oldest blue crab in the world is pretty young.
“Its five- to six-year life span is beset by dangers, troubles and a good chance of being dead soon,” says John M.R. Bull, Virginia Marine Resources commissioner. “It’s not the stuff of a good life, being a blue crab.”
In fact, most live an average of only 1.5 years.
Unfathomable numbers of blue crab eggs hatch in spring in the southern Chesapeake Bay. One female crab alone may release as many as 2 million eggs, whose larvae are swept by wind and waves out to sea. Called zoeas, these microscopic crabs-to-be look like some fantastic imagining of a steampunk artist, all sharp beaks and spikes and hinged tails and gigantic eyes. They molt seven or eight times during their first few weeks of life (assuming a fish hasn’t already eaten them), each time shedding the outer shell and emerging a little larger and a little more crablike.
Some of these megalops, as they are called once they develop tiny claws and legs, return to the Chesapeake Bay, borne on water or, sometimes, hitching rides on jellyfish. Bull calls them “the lucky few.”
“If you have the right winds, if you have the right tides, a number of them can wash back into the Bay,” he says. “They start to move up the Bay, where they’re breakfast for black drum, they’re lunch for red drum, they’re snacks for striped bass – the entire food chain preys on them.”
Blue crabs, it seems, are delicious right from the start.
As they grow, they migrate north, seeking shelter in underwater grasses and in rivers. A crab shedding its hard outer shell is known first as a buster, then a peeler. It emerges soft and weak and, while its shell stiffens, looks for a place to hide. Watermen are happy to provide this with a trap called a peeler pot, since soft-shell crabs are considered a delicacy. Often battered and fried, they are eaten legs, shell and all.
“They encounter the peeler potters in the spring – April, May and June,” Bull says. “That is their first step toward becoming lunch.”
Blue crabs that evade the peeler pots face other trials. Males prefer lower salinity water and may hang out in tributaries, where they encounter blue catfish. These fish, native to the Mississippi, Missouri and Ohio rivers, were introduced to Virginia waters in the 1970s for recreational fishing. What seemed like a good idea at the time has been bad for crabs and many other species, as blue catfish are indiscriminate feeders, growing up to 100 pounds on a diet of whatever fits in their mouths.
Small crabs may also be eaten by larger crabs, because they’re cannibalistic, Bull says. Hiding in underwater grasses is not as easy as before, because those grasses are struggling, too. The amount of submerged vegetation in the Bay is a fraction of what it was before pollution degraded the water. Grass beds have still not recovered from huge amounts of rainfall and sediment washed into the Bay by Tropical Storm Agnes in 1972.
Pollution can also lead to dead zones in the Bay, where the water does not contain enough dissolved oxygen to support life. In those places, crabs can suffocate. Sometimes they flee the water, seeking to breathe. These frenzied mass evacuations are known as crab jubilees.
“If you survive as a larval blue crab, the deck is stacked against you,” Bull says. “And that is in a good year. If it’s a bad year, you’ll run into an unexpected population explosion of some predator. In 2012, they ran into puppy drum. It was like the ultimate all-you-can-eat buffet for them. Puppy drum had a very good year and the blue crab had a very bad year.”
Puppy drum become red drum. As they grew that year, they fed voraciously on blue crabs. The attack of the puppy drum was unusual, Bull says, and no one is quite sure why there were so many. In 2010, recreational fishermen reported catching about 28,600 puppy drum in Virginia. Two years later, 2.5 million were caught.
The Bay’s crab population plummeted from an estimated 765 million to 300 million, male and female. That still sounds like a lot. But scientists have calculated that, because crabs are eaten by so many predators, the Bay needs 215 million spawning females alone to support the species and everything that depends on it. In 2012, the Bay had just experienced its best blue crab birth rate in two decades. Then: “Three-fourths of the juveniles went ‘poof,’ ” Bull says.
Still, the lucky few blue crabs persist. As summer progresses, they move up the Bay and mate. In the fall, the females head south again, to the higher salinity waters where they prefer to spawn. All along the way, on the journey up and the journey back, they are tempted to enter traps. Depending on the time of year, those traps may be baited with menhaden or clams (to catch hard-shell crabs), with a live male crab exuding pheromones (to catch breeding adult females) or with nothing (to lure peeler crabs hunting for shelter).
“The estimate we have is that Virginia sets, per day, 400,000 to 500,000 crab pots,” Bull says. “Maryland sets more than that. They run the gauntlet of a million crab pots set throughout the Bay.”
For those that survive, winter finally arrives, the season when blue crabs burrow into the mud and go dormant. It is not true hibernation, but their wants and needs are few until spring comes again.
These are the victors.
“They have won the crab lottery,” Bull says. “They have survived an entire year.”
In spring they awaken. The females release their eggs, millions of them, and the cycle starts again for Callinectes sapidus, translated from Greek and Latin as “beautiful savory swimmer.”
A bushel basket sits on the dock at Cape Charles, half full of crabs whose shells are olive green and bright cerulean blue, some flaunting orange-red claws – the bright colors that earned them the “beautiful” part of their name. A few raise their pincers as a warning – their last warning, as it turns out. These crabs are to be raffled off and eaten in just a few hours, to raise money for a playground in this small town near the southern tip of the Eastern Shore.
Three measuring tools lie on the railing outside the harbormaster’s office, precise to the thousandths of an inch. A big crab is a lucky crab. Virginia allows the harvest of peeler crabs when they reach 3¼ or 3½ inches, depending on the time of year, well before they are old enough to reproduce. Male or immature female hard crabs must be at least 5 inches. There is no size limit on adult females.
The crabs in the basket are larger, donated from this April day’s catch by crabbers entering the “Big Jimmy” contest.
Crabbing has an extensive vocabulary. Jimmies are males.
She-crabs, also known as sallies, are immature females. Sooks are adult females. Peelers are molting crabs whose new shell has developed under the old, hard one, and a soft-shell has completely lost that hard covering but not yet toughened up. Sponge crabs are females carrying eggs.
In the market, a whole new identification system takes over – and it may vary from place to place. Jimmies are graded as small, medium, large, jumbo or colossal/heavyweight, and also as No. 1, No. 2, etc. Soft-shells come in hotel, prime, jumbo and whale grades.
The largest jimmy in the basket is 7.243 inches from side to side – a colossal – when Allen Parks docks the Elizabeth Joy, out of Tangier Island, and brings in a competitor. A small crowd gathers to watch harbormaster William “Smitty” Dize and assistant Barbara Michaux apply digital calipers to the crab.
“I don’t think he’s gonna do it,” Parks says, but the measurement is 7.411 inches: a new leader.
He takes the news with a grain of salt. He says he’s seen another crabber, yet to come in from checking his pots, land “a monster” that morning.
Parks has been crabbing most of his life, which at this point is 37 years. Thirty-eight bushel baskets full of blue crabs are stacked on the Elizabeth Joy, nine below the state limit. Virginia began setting such limits in 2012, after crab numbers dropped in the Bay.
“It’s a hard living,” Parks says as he waits to sell his catch to Lindy’s Seafood of Maryland. Each bushel, he says, will bring him $150. “If you went to a seafood store in the cities, I bet it’d be every bit of $250 for a bushel. If I got those kind of prices, I’d have it made.”
The National Marine Fisheries Service says the Chesapeake’s commercial catch of blue crabs in 2013, the latest year for which statistics were available, was worth $73.9 million to watermen, with 48 million pounds of blue crab landed.
Because they are so important, they are protected, managed and regulated by two states and multiple agencies – in Virginia, the Marine Resources Commission; in Maryland, the Department of Natural
Resources; in the Potomac, which crosses state lines, the Potomac River Fisheries Commission. The states work together but are free to set their own regulations.
Virginia watermen most often use pots to harvest blue crabs. Marylanders also use pots but, because those are not allowed in tributaries, there they use trotlines, long lines with multiple baits. Crabs are netted after grabbing the bait.
In Maryland, much of the catch is large male crabs, which prefer the lower salinity of the upper Bay and its tributaries. The harvest of egg-bearing females is prohibited, but few of those are found in Maryland anyway. Virginia, which has the higher-salinity water and preferred spawning grounds near the mouth of the Bay, has more females. The state does allow the harvest of sponge crabs, but a 1,000-square-mile sanctuary and closing of the winter dredge season is intended to protect them. The Potomac River Fisheries Commission set a limit this year of 12 bushels of female crabs a day, between April 1 and June 30.
As the afternoon ticks on, trucks begin backing up to the dock for the day’s catch. Parks unloads his full baskets, reloads with empty ones, and casts off his boat just as the Shanna and Brandon, out of Onancock, docks with the monster, five minutes before the competition is to end.
“Good Lord almighty! Wow!” exclaims a bystander.
“Holy cow!” Dize says, reading the calipers, and he measures again just to make sure, before dropping the jimmy into the raffle basket.
“What have you got?” Parks shouts as he sails past.
“Eight point zero nine nine,” Dize shouts.
“Oh, my Lord, you got him,” Parks calls back, as Dize lifts the basket lid to let another waterman look.
“See him in there?” Dize says, and the waterman says, simply, “Jesus!”
The biggest blue crab on record from the Chesapeake Bay was 10.72 inches across and weighed 1.1 pounds.
A big crab may be a lucky crab, but for the past several years, the luck has run out. Scientists in Maryland and Virginia count crabs each winter to help managers set harvest limits and tweak other regulations. In 1991, the survey showed 828 million crabs in the Bay. Of that, 227 million were females old enough to spawn. Since then, numbers have dropped, sometimes precipitously, to a low of 251 million crabs in 2007, with only 89 million of those being females that might spawn.
After low counts in 2004 through 2007, the federal government declared the blue crab fishery a disaster, and the states took drastic action. The harvest of female crabs was cut 34 percent. A deepwater sanctuary was expanded to cover almost 1,000 square miles of the Bay in Virginia. The winter dredge fishery, which allowed watermen to scrape dormant female crabs out of the mud, was closed. It has never reopened.
The regulatory changes worked, Bull says. The number of spawning-age females climbed to 246 million in 2010. But three years of unfortunate, uncontrollable events sent it plunging again.
In 2012, there was the invasion of the puppy drum. In 2013, there were puppy drum and cold weather kills. In 2014, the hard winter froze more than a quarter of all blue crabs. As a result, that year’s winter survey showed only 69 million females of spawning age left in the Bay.
“If we get down to 70 million spawning females, you are in danger of a stock collapse, which is a catastrophic event that would take decades – I can’t even contemplate it,” Bull says. “It would be catastrophic culturally, economically, environmentally. More mamas mean more babies. It’s as simple as that.”
The harvest was cut by 10 percent, and daily bushel limits set for commercial crabbers, among other measures.
Again, the protection worked. This year’s survey, released in late April, showed “moderate improvement” in the blue crab population, despite the killing cold of winter. The number of spawning-age
females rose 46 percent to 101 million – better, but still far below the target of 215 million. The number of juvenile crabs rose 35 percent.
The number of crabs Baywide is now estimated to be 411 million, half of what it was in 1991.
“We need to remain cautious,” says Rom Lipcius of the Virginia Institute of Marine Science. “The good thing is we’re bouncing back. The bottom line is, we can be optimistic.”
Blue crabs are notably resilient, he added. They produce a new generation each year, millions and millions of zoeal blue crabs that, if they’re lucky, grow quickly to adulthood, producing millions and millions more just like them. Along the way, they support watermen, the processing industry, restaurants and home cooks.
“Crabs serve an important function within the Bay and the ecosystem,” Bull says. “They are a prized consumer good. And they are tasty, as I recall. My own personal policy is I don’t eat crab cakes when the abundance is down.”
But lots of people do. Blue crab is the largest single-species crab fishery in the world, worth nearly $300 million to the national economy.
The latest crab count is middlin’ good news.
“It’s not doom and gloom but nobody is jumping up and down saying it’s wonderful,” Bull says. “We need to keep this train on the track. If Mother Nature will give us a break, I’m very hopeful we’ll see a big jump in the stock.”
That would be delicious news.
Tasty they may be, but eating a steamed crab is a lot of work.
First, the crab’s legs must be snapped off. The back legs, used for swimming, are discarded. Only the two front legs, with their large claws, contain meat, which is reached by cracking the hard covering with fingers or metal crab pliers.
Then the “apron,” or abdomen, must be removed. In males, the apron is long and pointed, said to resemble the Washington Monument. In adult females, the apron is rounded with a dome on the top, said to look like the national Capitol. In immature females, the apron is V-shaped.
Once the apron is peeled back and snapped off, the top and belly shells can be pried apart. The exposed gills are then removed from the soft insides to reveal the meat, which is pried out and eaten on the spot.
Crab processing plants do the hard work for consumers, providing lump crab meat to stores and restaurants. Diners should be aware of what they’re getting, advises Rom Lipcius of the Virginia Institute of Marine Science.
Anything advertised as “Maryland-style crab cake,” whether on a menu or in the freezer case, is not
necessarily made from blue crab, he says. “Style” means they may include imported crab meat from Indonesia, Venezuela, Mexico or other places.
If in doubt, he says, ask.