Va. to Talk About Limiting Crab Catches

NEWPORT NEWS, Va. (AP) - Officials from the Virginia Marine Resources Commission are convening a public hearing Feb. 26 in Newport News to discuss possible catch restrictions for blue crabs, an economically lucrative species in the Chesapeake Bay whose population continues to sharply decline.

Virginia's crab harvest in 2006 ranked among the lowest recorded since 1945, according to a study recently released by the commission. The report also shows the Chesapeake Bay crab population is about 30 percent of early 1990 estimates and is continuing its decline despite regulations established in 1994 to halt it.

Estimates show the bay's crab population has plummeted from a little more than 450 million individual crabs in 1990 to about 150 million last year.

"Recent efforts to rebuild the resource are not working," said Jack Travelstead, Virginia's deputy marine resource commissioner and the state director of fisheries. "We're at low levels of population abundance, and we've been there for too long."

A review committee of 11 people, including Travelstead, revealed the extent of damage the blue crab population has undergone, and it issued the following recommendations:

• Shortening the crab harvest season
• Requiring watermen to place a second escape hatch in crab pots to allow undersized female crabs to avoid capture
• Discarding the practice of allowing watermen to purchase the right to fish another waterman's crab pots
• And instituting a pot-tagging system to make it possible for regulators to enforce limits on the number of crab pots that watermen may legally set.

Committee members say overfishing has decimated crabs in six out of nine years ending in 2006. They suggested that former cyclic patterns of abundance and decline no longer influenced the crab population, possibly because of overfishing.

Despite a region-wide cleanup that was once hailed as a national model of pollution control, Gov. Timothy M. Kaine and other leaders said last month they will miss their 2010 deadline to clean up the bay. Critics argue Virginia and other states have made little progress toward restoring the bay's health.

Travelstead said the crab population has dropped so far that a catastrophic storm or environmental setback could not be endured.

"Just one big environmental event like another die-off of submerged aquatic vegetation or a major hurricane could crash the population," he said.

Information from: Richmond Times-Dispatch

(Copyright 2008 by The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.)