Right now, the Chesapeake Bay Stock Assessment Committee estimates recreational harvest to be 8% of the total male commercial harvest. Particularly within the commercial sector, fishers are concerned about how big the recreational fishery is and whether that is possibly impinging on their ability to fish themselves.” “And a lot of people are concerned about the recreational fishery. “The recreational fishery is a bit of an unknown,” said Robert Semmler, a doctoral student at Lancaster University and lead author of the new study, published March 15 in The Canadian Journal of Fisheries and Aquatic Sciences. Robert Semmler, a doctoral student at Lancaster University, teamed up with the Smithsonian and local crabbers in the first statewide tagging survey to estimate recreational blue crab harvest in Maryland.(Credit: Isidro Bosch) This leaves managers in the awkward position of having to make their best educated guess. But recreational crabbers have no such obligation. Commercial crabbers are required to report how many crabs they catch each season. To keep that recovery going, fishery managers need a clear idea of how many crabs end up in commercial traps and on the tables of recreational crabbers. Once declared a “commercial fishery failure” in 2008 after years of record low numbers, blue crabs have made a somewhat bumpy but steady comeback over the past decade. “It’s such an important cultural activity here to go out and harvest crabs,” said Matt Ogburn, a biologist with the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center (SERC) and co-author of the new report. Biologists, with local community support, found stronger evidence for the underestimate in the first tagging study to estimate the recreational blue crab harvest statewide. When it comes to recreational crabbing-one of the most iconic pastimes along Maryland’s shores-the current estimate of 8% of "total male commercial harvest" runs just a little too low. To estimate recreational versus commercial crabbing, biologists outfitted crabs with these pink tags, offering a reward to crabbers who found them and reported the catch.
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