Dead zones imperil Chesapeake crabs
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WASHINGTON - Chesapeake Bay's iconic and profitable blue crabs face suffocation, hunger, and cannibalism as dead zones continue to expand across the estuary, draining oxygen from the water and killing off enough clams and worms to feed 60 million crabs.
That bleak assessment was made yesterday in a new report from the Chesapeake Bay Foundation, the nonprofit environmental group that monitors the bay and the multimillion-dollar industries it supports.
The foundation's president, William C. Baker, said that without support from the US Environmental Protection Agency, efforts by states to clean up the bay will continue to falter.
The steep decline of the crab population in less than two decades, from 791 million in 1990 to 260 million in 2007, has been well documented, but the foundation's report quantifies for the first time that 75,000 metric tons of the food that crabs eat are being lost each year as the dead zones expand around the bay.
Those oxygen-deprived zones send crabs fleeing into shallower waters, where they turn to cannibalism for lack of food and fall prey to predators.
