The Chesapeake Bay's blue crabs are on the rebound

Those tasty crabs you cracked open last weekend almost didn't make it to your table.

The Chesapeake Bay's blue crab population nearly crashed a few years ago. State-imposed protections in 2008 hit some crabbers hard, but in one of the world's great environmental success stories, the crabs are clawing their way back.

Now, crabbers say it's their turn. Some want the protections relaxed so they can catch more crabs.

"How big does our crab stock have to get before families can prosper off of this?" asked Jimmy Dean Close, a Mathews County crabber.

Clues should come in a much-anticipated report by a panel of bay crab experts to be released Aug. 9. The report, called a stock assessment, will lay out the latest science on crab reproduction and conservation.

The report, the first of its kind since 2005, will call for even more conservative ways to measure the health of the crab population, according to preliminary figures released last week.

For example, current rules say watermen are overfishing crabs when they take more than 53 percent of the population in a year. The new report says catching more than 34 percent of females is overfishing; a figure for males is yet to be specified.

"What this means is we've got a significant ways to go," said Virginia Marine Resources Commission spokesman John Bull. "And it's going to take longer than anyone expected to get the population of crabs in the Chesapeake Bay back where it needs to be in order to have a safe, sustainable harvest and a thriving population."

That could be an unwelcome message for watermen.

"This is going to be a bit of a game-changer in the commercial crabbing community here who had set their hearts on a loosening of the regulations to even further increase the harvest," Bull said. "It's going to disappoint them."

But because those protections increased the number of crabs, the bay-wide commercial harvest has already gone up — from 43 million pounds in 2007-2008 to about 90 million pounds in 2010-2011.

"I think we can enjoy a higher bay harvest and still enjoy good abundance" of crabs, said Rob O'Reilly, Virginia's deputy fisheries chief.

The marine resources commission is scheduled to decide Aug. 23 whether to loosen, maintain or tighten crab protections.

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The delicious and strangely cute blue crab has long been a living symbol of the bay.

Anyone who has spent time around coastal Virginia has caught crabs with chicken necks or sailed past crab-pot buoys. Hampton High School is home of the Crabbers.

And blue crabs mean greenbacks. They are Virginia's top commercial catch, producing a $34 million harvest in 2010.

So alarm bells went off around the bay when, despite efforts in Virginia and Maryland for years to help crabs, their numbers dropped 70 percent from 1991 to 2007.

"We were pretty close to a collapse," said Rom Lipcius, a Virginia Institute of Marine Science crab expert.

The crabs were suffering from overfishing, pollution and other problems.

In 2008, both states took steps such as shortening the harvest season. One of the biggest moves was Virginia's shutdown of winter dredging, a tradition more than a century old.

After mating, female crabs migrate south in fall so they can release their young in the salty waters of the lower bay the following spring. They spend the winter in Virginia under a blanket of mud.

About 90 percent of the crabs scraped up by winter dredges were females ready to produce young in spring, experts said.

Crabs responded quickly to the new protections. Surveys showed the population jumped from an estimated 249 million in 2007 to 463 million — the second-highest total since 1997 — this past winter.

Lipcius called the comeback "one of the few demonstrations worldwide of fisheries management that has actually resulted in recovery, short of a moratorium" on catches.

But the protections were tough on watermen such as Close, 46, who dredged crabs. "That kind of put a crimp in what I do in the wintertime."

Because dredging had gone on so long, through good crab years and bad, Close isn't convinced the practice was hurting crab numbers. He would like to see dredgers allowed to work again.

"But if they turned us loose, and there was another bad year, the fingers would be pointing at us," Close said.

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By the mouth of the salty Lafayette River in Norfolk, waterman Pete Nixon pulled up 20 crab pots, or traps, last Wednesday before 7 a.m. The angry, snapping contents filled three bushel baskets, a decent catch rate.

Nixon runs a small retail crab store, where he sells "number one jimmies" — large male crabs — for $20 a dozen, with smaller crabs going for less.

Nixon, 61, is feeling the pinch of the sour economy. High fuel prices are cutting into his profit, and some people seem to be holding off on buying crabs.

"We call it happy food," said the Norfolk resident aboard the 26-foot flat-bottom work boat he built in 1993. "People don't need to eat them."

Nixon was working in a half-pretty, half-industrial area that featured handsome waterfront homes to the east and the cranes of the Port of Virginia looming to the northwest.

The 2008 protections seemed to help crabs, Nixon said, but it's hard to tell which ones helped the most.

"I wouldn't put it all" on the dredging ban, he said.

Chris Moore, a scientist for the Chesapeake Bay Foundation, an environmental group, wrapped up a boat-to-boat visit with Nixon and headed his skiff back toward a Norfolk landing.

Along the way, Moore pointed out expansive dark blotches in the otherwise greenish Lafayette. An outbreak, or bloom, of algae was under way.

This was a classic sign of what's hurting the bay and its tributaries. Fed by pollution from farms, sewage plants and suburban storm-water runoff, the tiny algae grow in big numbers, then die and decompose, taking oxygen from the water.

This creates the bay's "dead zones" — places so low in oxygen that aquatic life can't survive.

Crabs can move, but if they are caught in small, low-oxygen tributaries, they can die, Moore said.

The crab protections helped, but cleaning the bay is the ultimate solution, he said.

"If we can get the ecosystem back, we may not need all these regulations on the fisheries side."