In Maryland, where the blue crab is the official state crustacean, many are simply doing without what has become a high-end luxury food they cannot afford this year. “Between labor shortages and dealing with COVID, there’s a multitude of different challenges going on, and now we don’t have enough product either,” she said. “It’s just one more challenge on top of the other challenges we’re kind of dealing with.” “When you sell crabs and there’s not very many of them, it makes it tough,” said Aubrey Vincent, who operates Lindy’s Seafood on Hoopers Island.

The shortage is affecting buyers and sellers alike throughout the sprawling Chesapeake Bay, the nation’s largest estuary. “Crabs are scarce this year because crabs periodically have been scarce, and prices are high because everybody wants to buy crabmeat here.” “There’s no exposé to be found, and there’s no evil person behind this or anything,” Sieling said. “I would have expected those effects not to really come until the second half of the season,” he said.īill Sieling, executive vice president of the Chesapeake Bay Seafood Industries Association, complained that “everybody’s trying to make a big deal about the supply of crabs,” but he said there’s an easy explanation: “There’s good years and bad years.” Miller, who also serves on the Chesapeake Bay Stock Assessment Committee, said the shortage would have made more sense if it had come around September, when the juvenile crabs grow big enough to enter the fishery. The conditions are relatively benign I don’t think there’s any environmental condition that could be driving it,” said Tom Miller, a professor of fisheries science and director of the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science’s founding campus, the Chesapeake Biological Laboratory in Solomons, Md. While it’s normal for the blue crab population to fluctuate from year to year, no one’s certain what caused this year’s steep decline. The cause of the shortage is something of a mystery.Ī winter dredge survey showed the overall population fell from 405 million in 2020 to 282 million in 2021, driven largely by a sharp drop in the number of juvenile crabs, which hit their lowest level since 1990. While the coronavirus pandemic shuttered restaurants and battered the blue crab industry last year, 2021 has brought more bad news: Prices skyrocketed due to a shortage of blue crabs in the Chesapeake Bay, long a top producer of the 'beautiful swimmer,' a species distinguished by its bright blue claws ( Greenwire, April 22, 2020).

Maryland blue crab