Data from the 2011-12 Blue Crab Winter Dredge Survey show that the Chesapeake Bay’s blue crab population is booming, fueled by a large increase in juvenile crab abundance.
The baywide survey is conducted annually by the Virginia Institute of Marine Science (VIMS) and the Maryland Department of Natural Resources (DNR).
Survey results show that the total population of blue crabs in Chesapeake Bay has reached 764 million, due to four years of a baywide stock-rebuilding programme.
This is a 66% increase above the 2011 abundance level of 460 million crabs, and is the highest level recorded since 1993. The baywide blue crab stock abundance is now more than triple the record low of 249 million, set in 2007, the year before the stock-rebuilding programme began.
Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell said, “This is fantastic news. The crab population is the highest it has been in the past 20 years, and to see this record production of juveniles is truly remarkable. Those crabs will grow over the summer and many will reach market size in the fall. Those that aren’t harvested and brought to the dinner table will become the building blocks for future generations of crabs.”
The new survey shows this year’s increase in crab abundance is the result of a massive baywide baby boom - an almost tripling of the number of juvenile crabs from 207 million last year to 587 million. Juvenile crab abundance has never been recorded at such high levels and the new record obliterated the old record of 512 million juveniles established in 1993.
Baywide, the crab harvest has increased substantially since 2008, from 43 million pounds to a preliminary estimate of 67.3 million pounds during 2011.
However, the survey results showed that the number of spawning age females recorded by the survey dropped by roughly 50% from 2011 levels, down to 97 million. But that level remains above the healthy-species threshold, and these types of fluctuations are neither unprecedented nor unexpected in the winter dredge survey.
