Crabbers find pots of money

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  • January 31, 2016 at 12:36 pm #38416
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    Crabbers Find Pots of Money in Abandoned Fishing Gear

    Researchers say a program that paid fishers to retrieve tens of thousands of lost cages resulted in a higher crab catch while reducing the number of fish accidentally caught.

    JAN 29, 2016

    by Richard Conniff (author of House of Lost Worlds: Dinosaurs, Dynasties, and the Story of Life on Earth, and other books)

    Chesapeake Bay crabbers took it hard in 2008 when the blue crab industry was officially declared a commercial failure. Blue crabs are to the Chesapeake what lobsters are to Maine—not just a major contributor to the economy but also the object of a venerable culture, based on crab pots in warmer weather and dredging in winter.

    Faced with the decline of this iconic industry, Virginia opted to shut down the winter crab harvest in its waters. Scientific studies had shown that it dredged up a disproportionately large number of reproductive females, meaning fewer crabs to catch in future years. The crabbers were skeptical, at best, when the state offered to put them back to work during the winter retrieving derelict and abandoned crab pots. Pulling up empty crab pots in winter is nobody’s idea of a good time.

    But the pots weren’t empty, “and that’s the headline,” said Kirk Havens, a biologist at William & Mary’s Virginia Institute of Marine Science. In the middle of winter, the pots were loaded with bycatch, almost all of it dead—not just crabs but striped bass, perch, catfish, even drowned muskrats and diving ducks.

    http://www.takepart.com/article/2016/01/29/crab-fishers-find-pots-money-abandoned-gear

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