THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Friday, December 1, 1995 TAG: 9512010009
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A18 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Editorial
LENGTH: Medium: 56 lines
A four-point plan to preserve the Chesapeake Bay blue crab, endorsed this week by the Virginia Marine Resources Commission, appears to be the least the state could do with any hope of success.
To do too little might doom the beautiful swimmers; to do too much would inflict unnecessary immediate hardship on more than a thousand watermen and their families.
The commission unanimously approved a plan favored by scientists, environmentalists and state experts - but opposed by seafood buyers and watermen as too restrictive.
The plan's main goal is to protect pregnant female crabs, needed to bring the crab population back from its current near-historic low. Maryland earlier shortened its fall crabbing season to protect pregnant females, prompting that state's watermen to complain that the females saved there would be caught in Virginia as they rushed south for the mouth of the Bay. Now, it appears, Virginia will do its part, as it should.
The commission plan limits the number of hard-crab pots to 300 per license holder. That restriction is supposed to reduce the number of pots by more than 30,000, thereby sparing as many as a million crabs a week. That step alone should save millions of females to reproduce. In addition, the plan bars possession of females with eggs visible, freezes the number of crab pot licenses and sets a 3 1/2-inch minimum size limit on soft-shell crabs.
Currently 623 people are licensed for up to 100 traps and 882 people carry licenses for more than 100 (with no upper limit). Reportedly only 8 percent of watermen have more than 300 pots.
The 300-pot limit should be enforceable because the plan requires that each pot be tagged. Maryland has a 300-pot limit but no tag requirement, making enforcement difficult to impossible.
Seafood buyers and watermen argue that crab stocks have fluctuated for centuries and in time will rebound naturally with minor changes in regulations. They proposed mild restrictions that, as staff writer Scott Harper reported Wednesday, ``do little to address a sharp rise in the number of hard-crab traps set in the lower Bay.'' (Eighty-five percent of the harvest is hard-crab.)
The commission's plan and the seafood buyers' and watermen's plan will both be released for public comment over the next six weeks. Two public hearings will be scheduled, probably this month. The commission is to vote on a final protection plan at its Jan. 23 meetings, in time for the 1996 crabbing season.
The commission should stick with its plan, despite the heat it is certain to receive from seafood buyers and watermen. Some economic pain has to be endured now to ensure the survival of the Bay's most precious resource. by CNB