Crab cakes. Crab soup. Crab Imperial. Encrusted with a favorite seasoning or lightly broiled as cakes, by the pound or by the bushel, we love our crab meat.
Blue crabs are one of the tastiest and more resilient species that come from the Chesapeake Bay and their fate is the hands of Pennsylvanians.
The good news is total numbers of blue crabs in the Chesapeake Bay are up slightly this year, after the 2012-2013 survey indicated a drastic loss down to 300 million. The 2015 Chesapeake Bay winter crab dredge survey shows populations of juvenile and adult blue crabs have gone up to 411 million. Most notable is how adult females have clawed their way from 68 million to 100 million.
Blue crab populations fluctuate because of a witch’s brew of factors like severe winters, the harvest, and pollution. Chesapeake Bay watermen supply as much as one-third of the nation’s blue crabs each year. About 75 percent of the Bay’s adult blue crab stock is harvested. As for Mother Nature, there is little any of us can do to control the weather.
But pollution control is within our grasp. Driven by our commitment at CBF to improve water quality in the Commonwealth as well as the Bay, we cannot think of delicious crab meat without also thinking of crabgrass.
A dense lawn is one of the more effective barriers against what many Americans consider intrusive and offensive crabgrass. Applying lawn fertilizer can help get the job done. But the runoff of nitrogen, phosphorus and sediment is the leading cause of impairment of 19,000 miles of Pennsylvania waterways. Agriculture is the largest source of that pollution. Urban and suburban runoff are also key sources.
The Commonwealth delivers half of the freshwater that flows into the Bay. It’s easy to see how what we do in Pennsylvania, through agriculture and what we put onto our lawns, affects the health of the Bay and its blue crabs.
The presence of nitrogen and phosphorus in the Bay encourages the explosive growth of algae. Algal blooms darken the water and block light, killing underwater grasses that re-oxygenate the water and provide critical shelter for crabs.
“Dead zones” are formed when blooms fed by polluted runoff quickly die and decay, sucking up oxygen. In order to find oxygen, crabs move to shallow waters where they are caught more easily. “Dead zones” also destroy or inhibit the growth of clams and worms, an important food source for crabs.
The Chesapeake Clean Water Blueprint is a plan that sets pollution limits for the Commonwealth and the Bay. Pennsylvania has developed an individual plan to achieve those pollution reduction goals and committed to two-year milestones that outline the actions it will take to achieve success.
Achieving pollution reduction goals and improving water quality in Pennsylvania, with a sensitivity toward how we handle pollution, can ensure an ecosystem in the Bay that supports a healthy blue crab population.
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