
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: THURSDAY, August 31, 1995                   TAG: 9508310051
SECTION: EDITORIAL                    PAGE: A-12   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: 
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

OVERFISHING

YOU ORDER a bowl of she-crab soup at a restaurant, you hardly think you're dipping your spoon into a regulatory controversy. But you're right in the middle of the stew.

The sweet meat of the Atlantic blue crab has become so popular in recent years that its price has soared, attracting more watermen to the harvest and leading to serious worries about overfishing in the Chesapeake Bay. The blue crab makes the bay the region's most lucrative fishing ground, a $186 million-a-year industry.

An industry that is in danger of collapse.

That is the judgment of the scientists who study the bay crab and say there is no doubt the current rate of harvest could lead to a collapse of its population within several years. The watermen are skeptical.

They don't dispute that it takes twice as many pots to catch the number of crabs they caught a decade ago. But the population hasn't dropped, they maintain; there simply are more crabbers catching them. And they want to continue catching them.

It is a classic clash between the long-term interest of conservation and the short-term interests of people who earn their living off the land - or water, as the case may be.

And Virginia, as one of the jurisdictions that manage the bay, is in the thick of it - with predictable anti-regulatory zeal. While the Chesapeake Bay Foundation is pressing for a ban on deep-water fishing starting in September to protect egg-bearing females, Virginia and Maryland are delaying action until the results of a major study are known in November.

Like most conservation/use debates, however, both sides ultimately have an overriding interest in conserving the resources of nature. The immediate interests of the watermen will undermine their own long-term interests if they are wrong, and the crab population is dangerously low. It's just that immediate interests are so much more pressing.

Scientists can be wrong, of course. Their observations can be incomplete, their conclusions incorrect. But they have no discernible motive other than to ensure the crab's survival, and there is broad scientific agreement that tougher restrictions are needed.

We'd rather the she crab disappear from the menu for a few years than disappear forever.

by CNB