Crabbing in Virginia
When the Chesapeake Bay crab fishery was declared a federal disaster the Comonwealth of Virginia was promised $10 million in disaster aid. Virginia has decided to use some of that money to purchase back crab licenses to ease the financial burden on local watermen. The state had already planned to freeze 800 crabbing licenses for 2009 (these were licenses that had not been used for the past several years). And they will ban a type of crabbing called dredging, in which hibernating female crabs are scraped off the bottom of the bay. Some of the federal funds will also be used to pay crabbers to find and remove ghost pots – lost pots that continue to catch and kill crabs.
Virginia and Maryland hope to sustain crabbing as a sustainable fishery in the Bay.
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. I like your blog! There’s nothing better than a little physiology and marine biology packed into one 
. This story is so sad – and to think, with the way we’re going to Tuna fishery will collapse in a few years, too. That one won’t be so easy to try and salvage…
[...] that holds any hope for turning back the decay of our oceans, if that is possible. Whether it is restoration of the Chesapeake Bay to bring back the oysters and crabs, research in the Gulf of Mexico to maintain red snapper populations (check out that mahi my [...]