Development takes toll on Chesapeake crabs

Crab boats dart back and forth on the inlet of the Chesapeake Bay, the largest estuary in the US, as they have for generations. On the shore, million-dollar vacation homes catch the morning sun.

But watermen aren't pulling blue crabs out of the Bay this winter. After years of decline, the US Commerce Department declared the fishery a federal disaster last September and Maryland and Virginia shut it down until spring.

It was a symbolic as well as an economic blow for the men who harvest the region's defining culinary treat.

Watermen faced a stark choice: Stay ashore until March, or take a state job pulling abandoned crab traps and other junk from the bottom of the Bay.

So on this frigid winter morning, Spencer Headley is on clean-up duty, a floating janitor on one of the country's most intractably polluted bodies of water.

It's decent money - €240 a day plus expenses - and you can't beat those government hours. But Mr Headley, 32, wonders why he must now rely on the state rather than the water for his livelihood.

"We're not trying to tear the Bay up. We're just trying to make a living off a fishery that's been going for more than 100 years," he says, one eye on his sonar display.

"Why all of a sudden is it a disaster?"

That disaster has been steadily building since Europeans first mapped the Bay's shores 400 years ago.

Stretching roughly 320 kilometres from northern Maryland to southern Virginia, the Chesapeake is the largest estuary in the US and for hundreds of years was one of its most productive fisheries, yielding shad, sturgeon, oysters and baitfish. As recently as 1993, the Bay accounted for about half of the country's blue crab harvest.

But the fishery has declined as the region has boomed. Roughly 16.6 million people live in its watershed, which stretches as far as upstate New York, and an average of 439 more move to the region each day. That means more houses and more traffic as urban sprawl eats up forests and farmland.

The impact of this growth can be seen along Sligo Creek, which draws herons and foxes to its banks as it winds through the densely-packed suburbs northeast of Washington, DC.

Along the way, the creek picks up a steady stream of pollutants: Lawn fertiliser, pet feces, motor oil and silt, washing off the parking lots and other hard surfaces that cover 35 per cent of its 19 kilometres watershed.

Local activist Bruce Sidwell points out a sewer line that runs across the creek, exposed by years of erosion. It could be leaking raw sewage before long. Mr Sidwell's grass-roots group reports polluters and organises litter pick-ups, and he's eager to showcase the filtering pools that help clean the creek's upper reaches.

But water quality remains poor and is not likely to improve without substantial changes in the landscape, Mr Sidwell says.

On its journey to the Chesapeake, water from Sligo Creek mingles with run-off from farms and sewage treatment plans.

Nitrogen and phosphorus in that run-off feed massive algae blooms that suck oxygen out of the water each summer, killing clams and worms that provide the blue crab with food and aquatic grasses that give it shelter.

Last year, the "dead zone" covered 40 per cent of the Bay.

Not surprisingly, crabs have suffered. The 2007 catch was the worst in recorded history, and last year the catch was even worse in Virginia and only slightly better in Maryland.

With fewer crabs in the Bay, watermen now routinely catch far more than the 46 per cent that scientists say is the upper limit to maintain a healthy population.

Observers say time is running out to reverse the damage.

"The Bay is now degraded to the point that its basic ability to withstand even low levels of pollution is in jeopardy," said Naval Academy professor Howard Ernst, an expert on the restoration effort.

A 25-year, €4.8 billion clean-up effort by state governments and the US Environmental Protection Agency has come under widespread criticism as it has repeatedly fallen short of its stated goals. Officials also overstated their success to keep funding in place.

The Chesapeake Bay Foundation, an environmental group, sued the EPA last month to force it to set a firm cap on pollutants. The group is heartened that new EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson has promised to make the Bay clean-up a priority.

Easing his 14-metre Chesapeake Bay Deadrise back to the dock, Mr Headley passes by rusted shacks and crumbling chimneys, the ruins of once-thriving oyster and baitfish industries.