THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, May 5, 1996 TAG: 9605030251
SECTION: VIRGINIA BEACH BEACON PAGE: 21 EDITION: FINAL
COLUMN: Coastal Journal
SOURCE: Mary Reid Barrow
LENGTH: Medium: 87 lines
If I had to list just one thing in this world that is my very favorite food, crab cakes would be it.
Ever since I was a child, eating those crisp, golden brown delicacies down in Deltaville where my family used to go on weekends, crab cakes have been at the top of my list of good things to eat.
Recently I've been afraid that my beloved food from childhood was heading the way of the Virginia oyster and disappearing from the planet. The Chesapeake Bay blue crab, like oysters, has long made our region famous and is becoming a scarce commodity, probably due to over-harvesting.
The conservation problem is especially bad down here in our area where most of our winter crab meat comes from dredged crabs and most of those crabs are females. Even in summer we have a predominance of females because male crabs prefer less salty water where they grow into the great big Jimmy crabs, popular at crab feasts.
We have so many females here because mated females travel from all over the Chesapeake Bay to the Bay mouth to hibernate for the winter. The young larvae that hatch from the puffy orange roe, unlike adult crabs, must live in the salty water where Bay meets ocean to metamorphose into a blue crab as we know it.
Although there are legal size limits throughout the state and restricted crabbing areas here, more and more folks in our area are beginning to wonder about the wisdom of eating dredge crabs, period. No matter how you slice it, you are most probably eating mated females which can't help but further reduce the crab population.
If all of us just made a vow not to eat crab meat in winter and to always release female crabs when we are crabbing, we could make our own impact.
Two folks who have already gone the extra mile to help the blue crab are Chick's Oyster Bar owner Mark Sill and artist Randy Battaglia. They have joined forces to spread the word about females crabs.
All along Sill has made his own statement. When you order steamed crabs at Chick's, you won't get females, only Jimmies, and this is Sill's year-round policy at the restaurant.
Now Sill has gone a step further and commissioned Battaglia to paint a colorful female crab for the outside wall of the restaurant. You know she's a female because she has characteristic red-tipped claws and you can see her raised apron on the rear, a sure sign of eggs underneath.
Blue crabs reveal their sex about as well as anything in nature. Only females have red ``fingernail polish'' on their claws and a mature female's apron is rounded, shaped like the dome of the capitol building. Male claws are bluish and their apron looks like the Washington Monument.
Battaglia, a Virginia Beach native, who grew up crabbing with his family at the Narrows off 64th Street, now lives outside of Lynchburg. But his paintings and murals still focus mainly on sea creatures.
Battaglia, who is going to donate part of his profits to the Virginia Marine Science Museum, wishes other seafood restaurants would purchase a blue crab mural and conservation message, too. He plans to market his prints of blue crabs and other sea creatures at local galleries.
Chick's Oyster Bar is already selling two of Battaglia's prints, one of a male and a female blue crab swimming in the water. The other print is of a ghost crab on the beach.
But the feisty blue crab is Battaglia's favorite sea animal. ``They look like little tanks,'' he said. ``If the Lord had made them bigger than us, we'd be the endangered species!''
Although blue crabs are not yet truly endangered, they could be heading that way. So listen to Sill and Battaglia. Stop by the restaurant on Vista Circle off Shore Drive and see what a female crab looks like and read the conservation message. If more of us were like them, the blue crab would have nothing to fear.
P.S. Children from kindergarten through 12th grade can explore the outdoors on a sensory marsh hike from 4:30 to 6 p.m. Tuesday at the Virginia Marine Science Museum. The fee is $5 for museum members and $7 for non-members. Call 437-6003.
. . MEMO: What unusual nature have you seen this week? And what do you know about
Tidewater traditions and lore? Call me on INFOLINE, 640-5555. Enter
category 2290. Or, send a computer message to my Internet address:
mbarrow(AT)infi.net.
ILLUSTRATION: Photo by MARY REID BARROW
Chick's Oyster Bar owner Mark Sill, left, commissioned artist Randy
Battaglia to paint a colorful female crab for the outside wall of
the restaurant. Chick's serves only males - or Jimmies.
by CNB