This is shaping up to be an above average year for blue crab populations in both the Delaware and Chesapeake Bay. There were twice as many juvenile crabs born last fall than the 40 year average. And many older crabs were able to survive this year’s mild winter.
I went searching to find out why crab populations are up, and what that means for your next crab feast.
My journey began when I met Craig Pew on a recent sunny afternoon in Leipsic as he was unloading bushels of crabs from his boat. He was separating the males from the females.
Pew: “This is the female right there. See the difference in the claws are red. And these guys right here have blue on the end of theirs.”
Morrison: “And that’s how you tell, because of the red claws and the blue claws.”
Pew: “Yeah, well, that’s one way to tell between the male and female.”
Pew has been crabbing for 35 years on the Delaware Bay, and he said this year appears to be a good one.
“Compared to the last two years, it's up,” he said.
He credits the abundance of crabs to this year’s mild winter.
“We had a nice holdover from last year’s catch of crabs. They’re grown up, they’re big. And they’re nice looking crab. And as long as the wintertime doesn’t kill ‘em -take em out- then you get to harvest some of that" he said.
But, it may be more complex than that. It’s still a mystery why there were more than twice the average number of crabs born last year.
It’s really hard to explain why the blue crab population fluctuates, according to Rich Wong, who tracks blue crab populations for Delaware’s Division of Fish and Wildlife.
It was normal to see spikes in blue crab populations as high as six times the average population of 100 million as recently as the early 2000’s.
But Delaware Bay hasn’t had spikes like that in the past decade.
“But, perhaps with what we’re seeing in the survey this year and what we saw last year with baby crabs. Maybe those peaks will start to occur again,” he said.
And blue crab populations aren’t just on the rise in Delaware Bay.
Populations in Chesapeake Bay have been increasing for the past two years. And there’s a reason for that, according to the director of NOAA’s Chesapeake Bay Office, Peyton Robertson.
“I would say, and certainly not just in a hopeful way, that I believe the management practices that are put in place are working,” he said.
One of those management practices is harvest limits. Crabbers on the Chesapeake are limited to harvesting 36 percent of all female blue crabs. But last year, they harvested less than half that: 15 percent.
“They’re harvesting less than potentially they could. And the population seems to be responding to that,” Robertson said.
The story is the same on the Delaware Bay. Crabbers have only been harvesting about 20 percent of all crabs, male and female, even though the limit is more than twice that: 50 percent.
But crabbers like Pew are still catching plenty of crabs. He’s pulling in about a dozen bushels a day, with prices staying pretty steady at $100 per bushel. There are just more crabs to be had.
Isaac Burrows was preparing to boil a dozen blue crabs for someone’s lunch when I met him.
“This spring we had the nicest biggest crabs I’ve ever seen. And I’ve been here 31 years. I mean they were brutes. They were all brutes,” he said.
Burrows has owned and operated Sambo’s Tavern in Leipsic since the mid 1980’s. He said you can expect to see some nice size crabs this year. But don’t expect the price to drop too much.
Yeah, there are more crabs, he said. But there are more people eating them too.
“We started in ‘85, and in the beginning we had crabs for $12 a dozen. And now they’re $45 a dozen. I think the supply is just keeping up with the demand,” he said.
So those days of $12 for a dozen crabs may be over. But it may make you a little less crabby to know that it’s looking like there will be plenty of crabs out there to eat for years to come.
