A crab being measured during the 2023 Bay-wide Blue Crab Winter Dredge Survey. Photo courtesy of Kenny Fletcher/Chesapeake Bay Foundation
In a reversal from a decision earlier this year, the Virginia Marine Resource Commission voted 4-1 last week to have a public hearing on keeping the winter dredge crabbing season closed, but extend the pot catching season, two measures both the industry and one conservation group did not oppose.
VMRC board members A.J. Erskine, Will Bransom, Jeanette Edwards and Thomas Preston voted Tuesday in favor of the proposals. Spencer Headly voted against, with three other board members absent.
VMRC will come back in October to make a final decision on the proposals, after initially voting in June to repeal the regulation that prohibited the winter dredge crabbing season. Crabbers sought the repeal to create a winter market to sell their catches at higher values.
The proposals acted on Tuesday were recommendations by the VMRC Crab Management Advisory Committee, or CMAC, which initially recommended to VMRC the reopening of the winter dredge season. But since the June decision, CMAC met twice with a discussion facilitator to examine data on the number of crabs in the Chesapeake Bay, and what the impact of a winter dredge crabbing season would be.
The change from the June decision, CMAC members told their VMRC colleagues this week, was a realization of a “conservation equivalency,” that having the winter season would force crabbers to catch less during the rest of the year in order to stay below conservation caps put in place across the Chesapeake Bay when crabs reached disastrously low levels in the early 2000s.
“A lot of these crabbers are like, ‘Hold on, I don’t want to give up my slice with my size of the pie to accommodate a fishery that I might or may or may not participate in,’” Ed Tankard said during Tuesday’s meeting.
Winter crab dredging is the act of using metal chains to catch crabs buried in the bottom of the seafloor to haul them in. A winter dredge survey is conducted to count the numbers of females that bury into the mud during the colder months.
The concern with a winter dredge season is that 90% of the catch is females, which are sought after to spawn new juvenile crabs. One issue with the species, Romuald Lipcius, a professor at the Virginia Institute of Marine Sciences, told VRMC, is that juvenile crabs aren’t living long enough, possibly because of predation from catfish or red drum, or eggs getting impacted when they end up on shorelines.
Virginia had a winter dredging season, but closed it in 2008 after the number of female crabs in the Bay plummeted from over 200 million in 1991 to about 50 million in 2002.
To get those numbers back up, the three regulatory bodies within it, including VMRC, the Potomac River Fisheries Commission and the Maryland Department of Natural Resources, all took a 34% cut in crab harvest. VRMC closed the winter dredge season to account for half of that reduction.
The species since has only been allowed to be caught through traps, or “pots”, between March 17 and Nov. 30, except for a few years in which the season was extended by a couple weeks.
The number of crabs in the Bay has spiked back up and down to about 250 million in 2017, but has been on a downward trend to just under 150 million this year with no need for additional conservation measures.
The vote in June had put the VMRC in a bit of a pickle, because it repealed the regulation putting in place the prohibition on winter crab dredging from Dec. 1 to March 31.
As a result, Virginia currently has no rules on winter catch limits, and the number of participants after the regular season ends on Dec. 16, following a previously approved extension.
Having a winter dredge crabbing season would require determining catch limits and participants in order to establish the conservation equivalency, as well as changes to license regulations, all of which may not have been created until Dec. 3.
Advertising for a public hearing to keep the season closed this year came with an additional motion to have CMAC continue exploring the regulatory framework for future years, in order to allow a stock assessment expected to be finished in 2026 to not be altered.
The assessment was in 2011, even though others typically happen every three to five years.
More time allows staff to also figure out how to more easily open or close the winter season with that framework and understand what the full ramifications would be.
One potential impact could be limiting the type of equipment to be used in certain areas, and a brief ban on sponge crabs, which CMAC member Mark Sanford said wouldn’t impact him, but Nathan Reynolds said it would impact 90% of the crabbers on the Eastern Shore.
“I’m not trying to pin one thing against another person,” Reynolds added. “As we work to try to build that framework for the dredge fishery, we can extend the season.”
The latter would allow crabbers to continue fishing beyond an extension already to work through Dec. 31 and begin again March 1.
A similar extension happened in 2016 to 2017, and represented roughly 1% of the annual catch. Warming water could mean the crabs have not been buried into the sea floor during those extension periods, said Pat Geer, VMRC’s chief of fisheries management.
Chris Moore, of the Chesapeake Bay Foundation, an environmental group, said he understood the proposals had been recommended by the CMAC, but, “It’s not one of my favorites about this, because I think you all set very good seasons based on the information I had available back in June.”
VMRC also faces opposition to winter crab dredging from other groups, including the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Chesapeake Bay Office Sustainable Fisheries Goal Implementation team, and six online comments — but none in support of opening the winter dredge season.
“Crabbers way down the Bay have a much longer harvesting season than those who crab in the upper part of the bay, because of water temperature,” the Virginia Twin Rivers Waterman’s Association, which crabs at the end of the Rappahannock River and Potomac River, wrote in a letter to VMRC. “We need to shorten the harvest season so crabs can recover some before they are potted heavy again.”