Tag Archives: blue crab harvest

Chesapeake Bay: Targeting male blue crabs for harvest is preventing female crabs from having offspring

The Bay’s crab fishery is currently regulated to limit the harvest of female crabs, in a so-far successful effort to ensure that enough survive to reproduce and maintain the crustacean’s overall abundance — and sustain the estuary’s most valuable fishery. But researchers have wondered — and even worried at times — if harvesting more male crabs (or jimmies, as watermen call them) than females could be having an impact on the population. >click to read< 17:27

Louisiana: New restrictions create burden for local crabbers

For Whitney Curole of Des Allemands, being a fisherman is an “always” kind of thing — he’s been a crabber since his teenage years, following in the footsteps of his father, and that passion for fishing runs throughout his entire family. But all of that experience nonetheless doesn’t mean it’s not hard sometimes.  This year was the first in which the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries placed restrictions on blue crab harvest in an effort to restore the blue crab’s population in state waters.  “I fought against (the initial one-month ban),” said Curole, who catches crabs and ships them all over the country and who retails crabs himself through his family business in Donaldsonville. click here to read the story 09:05