Crabbing Regulations

12 Pages 3043 Words

l as the impact they have on the Bay and its crabbing industry.

CRABBING REGULATIONS
Wesche (2002) documents the history of crabbing regulations. The rapid expansion of Maryland crabbing began in the early 1870s, as the market for crabs expanded and led to the first major managerial move to regulate the yield. A closed harvesting season was established in1906 allowing time for the population to recover and replenish. The following year the state demanded that all harvested hard-shell crabs be a minimum of five inches in order to limit the number of juvenile crabs taken.
Before long new harvesting techniques were created which called for additional limitations. In 1939, the most popular means of crabbing used newly invented crab pots. These crab pots became the method of choice for many watermen because they were more efficient and involved less manual labor than previous methods. The number of pots allowed per license was set at thirty five in 1943 but has evolved throughout the years and the regulation has since been repealed allowing an unlimited number of pots (Maryland’s Commercial Fisheries 2002). As industry continued to grow, numerous regulations such as these were introduced and modified. Restrictions are still an unavoidable fact of life for modern participants in the crabbing industry with the ever-changing environment and economy (Wesche 2002). See table 1 for a more detailed summary of Maryland’s crab management (Wesche 2002).

Population decline
In recent times the Chesapeake Bay has seen a noticeable decrease in the blue crab population as well as in the yield taken by the watermen (Chesapeake Bay Stock Assessment Committee, no date available). Graph 1 shows how the number of young crabs has changed (Chesapeake Bay Stock Assessment Committee 2001). These calculations are produced by using trawl surveys.
Recent years have seen landings of approximately 30 million pounds, which are dwarfed by the...