It is entirely possible that Captain John Smith, famous for his explorations of the Chesapeake Bay and his alleged romance with Native American princess Pocahontas, frequently enjoyed dining on steamed blue crabs from the Chesapeake Bay. Blue crab shells have been identified in ninety-three Chesapeake Bay archeological sites from at least thirty-two hundred years ago to the twentieth century. Evidence of blue crab consumption has also been found on the grounds of George Washington’s home, Mount Vernon. It is likely that gourmet Thomas Jefferson included “beautiful swimmers” in his famous epicurean dinners. Imagine the founding fathers cracking and picking on a meal of steamed blue crabs, probably with lots of melted butter and washed down with tankards of beer.
Courtesy of Alex Rocco
The harvesting of blue crabs (Callinectes sapidus) has been a mainstay for watermen for generations. Picking and packing crab meat, a hard and tedious job, attracted immigrants from Ireland, Italy, Mexico, and other places. The industry thrived through the year 1915, but there was a drop in 1920, then there was a rise again after that. During WWII, there was a drop then the yield increased through 1995. By the mid-1990s declines were becoming evident and efforts were started to reduce the numbers of crabs harvested. By 2008, the yields were improved to the point that they were above the threshold for sustainability. Future harvests seemed to be encouraging until 2022.
The Maryland Department of Natural Resources (DNR) announced the results of the 2022 Baywide Blue Crab Winter Dreg survey, a cooperative effort with the Virginia Institute of Marine Science (VIMS), which annually estimates the number of blue crabs in the Chesapeake Bay. There were an estimated 227 million crabs in the bay in 2022 which is the lowest number since the survey started. The number of juvenile crabs in 2022 was 101 million crabs, a slight increase from 86 million juvenile crabs in 2021, but it was the third consecutive year of below average recruitment. The yield was dropping. The cause of the lower number of crabs is not overfishing. Weather, pollution, and predators are believed to be the culprits.
Courtesy of Alex Rocco
Alex Rocco holding blue crab.
Experts are concerned that over time the crab population will not be sustainable, and it could mean an end to the vital supply to consumers, the livelihood of watermen and the economy of the area. A group of people from divergent occupations have joined together to study the feasibility of growing blue crabs in an aquiculture environment similar to a salmon fishery.
Courtesy of Alex Rocco
Sub adult blue crab.
Aquaculture, also known as aquafarming, is the controlled cultivation (“farming”) of aquatic organisms such as fish, crustaceans, mollusks, algae and other organisms of value such as aquatic plants (e.g. lotus). Aquaculture involves cultivating freshwater, brackish water and saltwater populations under controlled or semi-natural conditions.
On March 10th 2023, the Associated Press announced a grant from the National Oceanic and Atmosphere Administration’s (NOAA) Greater Atlantic Marine Fisheries Division. The grant was shared by the University of South Mississippi, North Carolina State University Center for Marine Sciences and Sam Thomas, owner of Thomas Seafood in Beaufort, North Carolina and others. Dr. Dave Eggleston, the director of North Carolina State’s Center for Marine Science and Technology and a professor of marine, earth, and atmospheric sciences conceived an idea that seemed to be a win-win situation for the crabs and the farmers looking to diversify their crops using irrigation ponds already existing on their farms to grow blue crabs.
Dr. Eggleston is quoted in a press release from NC State, “We started out by catching small crabs in the wild and stocking them into farm ponds loaded with bass and bluegill predators and were still able to get 12 percent survival.” That worked out very well, and Dr. Eggleston moved on to the next step, which was to team up with a group that had the ability to grow hatchery-reared blue crabs in fresh water. He enlisted the expertise of the University of Maryland’s Center of Marine Biotechnology. Blue crabs were introduced into the freshwater of the experimental aquaculture ponds at NC State’s Vernon James Research and Extension Center in Plymouth, North Carolina, where the crabs exhibited some of the highest growth rates on record.
The results were so encouraging that Dr. Eggleston decided to try an even larger experiment. He had discovered that a lot of farmers in Eastern North Carolina were facing a declining demand for tobacco and were eager to diversify their crop offerings. Dr. Eggleston said, “A lot of these farms have irrigation ponds, and we thought if crabs can live in fresh water, this would take some pressure off the coastal crab population and give farmers another crop by letting their ponds work for them.” The researchers discovered that those crabs could tolerate a salinity level of .3 parts per thousand, which is about the same level found in coastal tap water. They did a large-scale test when they stocked a ten-acre lake with 40,000 hatchery-raised crabs, and a smaller pond with 4,000 crabs. The crabs will take approximately 105 days to reach maturity. As of this writing, the test is proving successful.
Courtesy of Sam Thomas
Sam Thomas of Thomas Seafood.
To get an accurate understanding of how well the growing of crabs in freshwater ponds could work out commercially, the project leaders teamed up with Sam Thomas, owner of Thomas Seafood in Beaufort, North Carolina. Thomas said, “We have the ponds to raise them. The crabs will be hatched from wild-caught females with eggs at our Gulf Coast lab, after which the newly hatched crabs will be transported to North Carolina, where they will be raised in two quarter acre ponds at Thomas Seafood.”
Dr. Eggleston commenting on the feasibility of a commercial operation said, “If you look at a two-and-a-half-acre pond, you could stock it with 50,000 hatchery-raised crabs and expect to harvest around 20 percent, or 10,000 fully grown crabs. At three dollars per crab, that’s $30,000 – and multiply that times three. It definitely adds up. “One of the problems researchers have encountered is the voracious appetite crabs have for each other. I asked Dr. Eggleston to comment on this problem. He said, “With the rapid rate of growth for pond-raised crabs, he expects that in a given year, a farm could produce two to three harvests, as crabs don’t do well in freshwater during the winter months. We try to minimize cannibalism in the hatchery by providing artificial structures such as plastic mesh and air-conditioning filter material, and then grading size classes every three days to separate relatively large versus small juvenile crabs”.
Ellen Cicuizak, in an article in the Hattiesburg American writes: “That soft shell crab you enjoy at your favorite seafood restaurant or that crab cocktail you order as an appetizer likely came from Southeast Asia, not the Mississippi Gulf. But if research at the University of Southern Mississippi’s Blue Crab Hatchery pans out, you might one day be eating soft shell blue crabs farmed by coastal fishermen in ponds on their own land.”
“What this work does is a diversification of the blue crab industry,” said Kelly Lucas, aquaculture director at the Thad Cochran Marine Aquaculture Center, located near the Blue Crab Hatchery in Ocean Springs, Mississippi. She added, “Fishermen can switch from the wild to supplement their fishing by raising blue crabs.” The university operates the only blue crab hatchery in the United States. Production of soft shell blue crabs is one of the oldest aquaculture industries in the country. The Blue Crab Hatchery has been around since the early 2000s. It was preceded by a hatchery in Maryland, which no longer exists.
The research done at the hatchery is vital to the livelihood of the 150 or so blue crab fishermen in Mississippi, who may have trouble getting the crabs from the wild. “If we can figure out how to raise blue crabs in ponds at certain salinity levels for commercial production, we can teach the commercial fishermen that instead of getting crabs from the Mississippi Sound they can grow them in ponds,” said Paul Mickel, chief scientific officer at the Mississippi Department of Marine Resources.”
Courtesy of Sam Thomas
Men harvesting in a blue crab pond.
NOAA’s National Sea Grant newsletter quoted seafood expert and entrepreneur Sam Thomas. Thomas is hopeful pond aquaculture will allow his business to offer live soft shell crabs for six to nine months out of the year. He said, “We do have good markets for our crabs. We have some good buyers that we depend on, and we’ve talked to them about the possibility of having crabs available more often throughout the year. Right now, we only shed in the spring because that’s the only time we can get enough peeler crabs here to make turning the tanks on worthwhile. We can sell bigger live soft shells, known as jumbos (5-5.5 inches from point to point) or whales (5.5+ inches) for about $60 per dozen in the early spring. If this is successful, I think we’ll see a lot of interest because it will give peeling operations a better year-round supply, and everybody likes that. Your restaurants like that.”
It makes perfect sense to develop blue crab aquaculture at a time when the warning signs suggest that conditions could very easily turn from bad to worse, and the harvesting of blue crabs might have to be curtailed or halted entirely. The efforts of the researches is not to eliminate the watermen but more to reinforce their future which at this point is very much in jeopardy and perhaps one day help restore the blue crab population of the Chesapeake Bay to the abundance it enjoyed during George Washington’s time.