In recent years, the blue crab fishery has become the main source of income
for Virginia's watermen. This fact, along with growing concerns of overharvesting
and uncertainty about the amount of effort in the fishery, has led to calls for more
complete data on the fishery. This study examined the characteristics of Virginia's
blue crab fishery, through an extensive survey of crab pot license holders conducted
on a monthly basis from March to November of 1992.
Along with a description of the people in the fishery, this study also modeled
prices, harvest levels, and income levels for the blue crab industry. Because the
models were interactive in nature, the effects of various fishery management
strategies were also analyzed. The main emphasis of the policy simulations was to
discover what impacts the different strategies had on harvest and income levels. The
results of the simulations showed that many of the policies currently under
consideration will have only a small impact on overall harvest and income levels, but
there are some larger distributional effects among different firm classes. The
findings of this study suggest that in order to gather accurate and useful data on the
fishery, the random surveying techniques of this study should be continued over a
period of years.
next to an author's name indicates that all files or directories associated with their ETD are accessible from the Virginia Tech campus network only.
![[VT]](http://scholar.lib.vt.edu/images/ETD-db/restricted.gif)
