Watermen will advise state officials on how to increase the dwindling blue crab population in the Chesapeake Bay.
“We need to work with the stakeholders to develop a plan for the blue crab and help rebuild that population; it?s essential,” said Lynn Fegley, a fisheries biologist with the Maryland Department of Natural Resources.
DNR officials are meeting with professional and recreational crabbers this month to gauge opinion on ways to increase the number of year-old crabs in Maryland to 200 million, which would be the highest since 1993.
The state is on the verge of dropping below 86 million year-old crabs, which DNR calls the threshold of a population crisis. DNR hopes to have the reforms in place before the start of the spring crab harvest.
Without action to preserve crabs, overfishing could put the species in serious danger, Fegley said.
A recent survey showed the number of crabs in the Chesapeake Bay dropped to 21.8 million, the second-lowest in 60 years.
Crabs were overfished last year after seven years of regulation had curbed harvest exploitation, officials said.
Someinitial recommendations from DNR include no recreational fishing of female crabs, licensing recreation crabbers and shortening baited trotlines.
DNR officials say Maryland is not alone in this effort and needs similar actions in Virginia.
Virginia?s Blue Crab Advisory Committee made several recommendations last week. They include reducing the number of crab pots by 10 percent, extending harvest bans in sanctuaries by two weeks and requiring extra holes in crab pots for younger crabs to escape.
The panel also recommends cracking down on the practice of “agents” and “permit stacking,” in which watermen lend their crabbing licenses to family, friends or hired workers, who then collect and sell crabs and share the profits.
But some Virginian crabbers are skeptical about the proposed regulations.
“A lot of what we?re proposing may not be worth the paper they?re written on,” said Pete Nixon, a Norfolk crabber and president of the Lower Chesapeake Bay Watermen?s Association.
DNR officials declined to comment on the adequacy of the Virginia proposals. But Fegley said some of the recommendations are already in place in Maryland, and others are Virginia-specific.
Maryland and Virginia face record-low harvests and failing strategies to reverse the trends.
The Associated Press contributed to this story.
