By: Bill Thompson


(photo by David Harp)


By this time of the year, the Chesapeake Bay’s blue crabs have heeded their primordial siren and are swish-paddling to their winter quarters. It is a migration of incredible numbers—tens of millions of critters skittering sideways across 4,480 square miles of curlicued tidewater tributaries and the broad, murky underbelly of the bay.

The female crab steers toward southern waters, where the higher salinity is more suitable for spawning. The male travels shorter distances, but dives deeper in search of sanctuary beneath a blanket of sand or mud until spring arrives. To say that it hibernates is technically correct, but that implies that a crab knows peace. Its cold-weather respite is more a bivouac; a crab’s existence is mostly drama, shifting from one battleground to another in a lifelong struggle to avoid being eaten alive.

Almost every living animal wants to consume crabs, no matter their age or size. Birds stalk them along the shoreline and seek them from the air. To ravenous fish, little crabs are like popcorn. Even crabs like to eat crabs: Given the chance, a crab will devour its own children. But perhaps no creature savors the Chesapeake’s most famous resident like the mallet-swinging bipeds for whom, during Maryland’s it’s-not-the-heat-it’s-the-humidity months, the four most beautiful words in the English language are “hot crabs, cold beer.”

The Chesapeake Bay that we’ll never know again was a massive seafood factory: oyster bars so big that boats could run aground on mountains of bivalves, clam beds plentiful enough to keep New England seafood shacks afloat after the Yankees depleted their native waters. But after decades of over-harvesting, pollution, disease, poor management, and the ill effects of our recent infatuation with shoreline development, the bay’s inhabitants have been so battered that blue crabs are the Chesapeake’s last viable commercial fishery.



Vanishing industry: Waterman Elihu Abbott runs a trotline in the Honga River. Last year’s Chesapeake crab harvest was the lowest since the end of World War II.
(photo by David Harp)


And scientists and policy makers are warning—despite protests from the commercial crabbing industry—that the blue crab population, even though it still numbers in the many millions, is in peril. Last year’s bay-wide catch of 43.5 million pounds of crabs was the lowest since the end of World War II. Most alarming, marine biologists say, is the downward trend in the population of spawning-age blue crabs, the females whose vulnerable larvae are the bridge to the survival of Maryland’s most celebrated icon. Responding to cries of alarm from Maryland and Virginia politicians, the U.S. Commerce Department in September declared the crab fishery a federal disaster, marking a historic low point in the chronology of the Chesapeake blue. 

Precisely how the emergency declaration will affect crabs and the crabbers who catch them remains to be seen. Watermen could be put to work helping restore bay habitat and may be eligible for low-interest business loans. Historically, watermen loathe the idea of government handouts (many refused financial assistance when they were unable to catch oysters during one of the bay’s rare freeze-ups in 1977). Still, times have never been harder for the Chesapeake waterman, who, as a small businessman, can easily have a quarter million dollars invested in his boat and gear.

But here’s the paradox: The crabs are disappearing, and with them an industry, a way of life, an irreplaceable regional culture. But, looking at menus and supermarkets around town, you would never know it. There’s fresh crabmeat in the seafood case year-round, and rare is the Mid-Atlantic restaurant that doesn’t have a crab cake on the menu. If the Maryland crab—long a backyard staple for the lunch bucket crowd, a resource once so common that it was fed to livestock—has become a rare delicacy, why is crabmeat as ubiquitous as lumps in gravy?

The technical answer involves a seafood bait-and-switch: a doppelganger on the other side of the world, a bit of marketing sleight-of-hand. But, beyond the economics of supply and demand, something more troubling occurred. The Maryland blue crab could burrow deep into the Chesapeake mud, never to emerge again, and few of us—aside from the relative handful who still pry a living from the waters of the bay—would even notice.



(photo by David Harp)


At a restaurant in Annapolis, I recently sat down to have lunch with Ann P. Swanson. She’s the executive director of the Chesapeake Bay Commission, a group founded in 1980 to advise lawmakers in Maryland, Virginia, and Pennsylvania about how best to address issues facing the bay—including the troubled blue crab population. The commission is composed of state government cabinet members, fifteen legislators, and three “citizen representatives,” all thoughtful individuals whose nearly impossible mission is to come up with a plan acceptable to everyone who has a stake in the country’s largest estuary.

It was summer, the peak of the commercial crabbing season on the bay. I opted for the traditional crab cake, and Swanson chose the crab melt. She also asked the server, a friendly woman about college age, if the crab was domestic. Yes, the server assured us, it was Maryland crab. Swanson politely asked if she wouldn’t mind double-checking with the chef.

Minutes later, the young woman reappeared at our table with a stricken look on her face. “I was completely wrong,” she apologized. “It’s Asian meat.”

Swanson had guessed as much. “It’s called blue swimming crab as opposed to blue crab,” she told the server. Asian crab meat, she explained, has less flavor than the native crab but is whiter, contains bigger lumps and fewer shell fragments, and is cheaper than meat from crabs caught in waters less than a mile from the restaurant.

“Yeah, yeah,” said the server, nodding before she ran off to another table.

“Why don’t they tell the staff?” I wondered aloud.

“They never do,” Swanson whispered.

This scene repeats itself every day in hundreds of dining rooms around the bay. It is the restaurant equivalent of “don’t ask, don’t tell,” although the phrase “Maryland-style” offers a clue that the chief ingredient comes from thousands of miles away. It is widely assumed these days that many longtime Marylanders and nearly all tourists cannot distinguish the flesh of Callinectes sapidus, the Maryland blue crab, from Portunus pelagicus, the imposter from the waters off Southeast Asia. But that this happened at a restaurant just a few blocks from the Maryland State House is not without a touch of irony. In 1989, state lawmakers passed a bill designating Callinectes sapidus as the official state crustacean.

For those who find meaning in championing insects, birds, dinosaurs, and dogs as state symbols, the elevation of the common blue crab was not such a foolish notion. Just a few years earlier, the value of commercial crab catches had exceeded oysters—which had been crippled by disease, pollution, and overharvesting—for the first time in state history. And despite decent crab harvests throughout the 1980s (1985 saw bay-wide landings of hard crabs exceed 53 million pounds), crabbers and processing houses couldn’t keep up with a growing demand. Thanks in part to the marketing efforts of the state’s seafood industry, Americans had developed a taste for Maryland crab. And they wanted it all year.

In 1989, while seafood marketers were celebrating the crab’s new status, Baltimore-based Phillips Foods was tackling the supply problem. Concluding that meat picked from crustaceans caught in the waters off Southeast Asia could mimic the crab served in its stateside restaurants, Phillips hired and trained Philippine workers to catch the blue swimming crab and built plants where the meat could be processed and shipped to the United States.

It’s a well-known story: how the Phillips crab dynasty began humbly on Hoopers Island in Dorchester County, spreading from a summer restaurant in Ocean City to Baltimore’s Inner Harbor and beyond. A lengthy 2005 account of the company’s dominance in the imported crab trade in the Washington City Paper ran under the headline “Crab Imperialist.” These days, company officials are tight-lipped about their operations and, through a spokeswoman, declined to answer questions for this article.

Almost all of the “Maryland-style” crabmeat served in the Phillips restaurants and sold through its food distributors comes from Asia. And while blue crab aficionados may look down their forks on Phillips’ saturation of the market with the swimming crab meat, the family-run business did not invent the practice of importing foreign seafood. In the early 1930s, Maryland officials noted that domestic crab processors faced competition with imports of a similar kind. In 1930 alone, the United States imported about 10 million pounds of crabmeat, mostly from Japan. At that time, this country produced more than 83 million pounds of crab, with nearly 69 million pounds coming from Chesapeake waters.

This past June, Phillips Foods was awarded an exclusive patent for a method of packing loose pieces of crabmeat into a mold so that the end product resembles perfectly shaped alabaster jumbo lump crab. In other words, their Maryland-style crab could even contain faux lumps.

It’s a technological breakthrough that may offer some comfort to fans of Chesapeake cuisine: Should marine scientists fail in their efforts to save the blue crab, food scientists will make sure that we’ll still get our jumbo-lump crab cakes, one way or another.




Water work: The Eastern Shore's seafood industry now relies heavily on foreign guest workers from Latin America, who receive a limited number of temporary visas to take low-paying jobs in processing houses.
(photos by David Harp)





Learning to love crabs—what poet and essayist Lance Morrow described as “lice monsters from the weeds”—is not an instinctive act. For a moment, suspend your familiarity with the animal and look upon it anew. Chadwick the storybook character and tourist-shop plush toys aside, a living crab is a repulsive and pugnacious creature, armored for battle and possessing a sour disposition, two menacing Popeye-sized claws, and a pair of stalked beady eyes the size of map pins. All in all, it has an undeniably creepy look, even when it is steamed and dumped onto a newspaper in front of you. Now, consider that you’re expected to rip the animal apart, sticking your fingers into its innards and extracting only the edible parts, leaving behind lungs, stomach, and heart.

Once you’ve ravaged a hard crab, however, the reward is undeniable. Delicate. Mildly fishy. And definitely sweet. No saltwater denizen—not the lobster, the oyster, the rockfish, or the tender-bellied clam—sits in the same pew as the Chesapeake blue crab.

I asked a few watermen, scientists, pickers, and policymakers why our blue crab tastes superior not only to the Indonesian species, but also to the blue crabs landed in the Gulf of Mexico or the Atlantic waters off North Carolina, the ones that Maryland crab houses rely on to augment the dwindling local catch. No one had a specific answer, although it is generally assumed that the blue crab’s flavor reflects its surroundings—the food it eats and the conditions of the water where it swims. As the crabs’ diet changes with the decline of some of its prey species, and as climatologists anticipate a warmer, saltier bay, Chesapeake blue crabs of the future could well lose some of that distinctiveness.

Currently, the dinner menu for a crab would have to list clams and oysters at the top; other crabs, of course; any fish (dead or alive); shrimp; eelgrass and other assorted aquatic plants; and almost every other organic matter in any stage of decomposition within claw reach. A crab is a scavenger, a dutiful housekeeper that performs yeoman service on the bottom of the bay. And that’s all most of us need to know.

(It’s better not to know this story, for example. Two watermen were out one morning pulling their crab pots when one rope wouldn’t budge. After much tugging and swearing, both men managed to bring the wire pot close to the boat, only to discover that it had snagged a human corpse. “Gosh dast! Get on the radio and call the police,” gasped one of the crabbers. “Not so fast,” said the other. “If we drop ’im back in, we’ll get another bushel off ’im tomorrow.”)

Considering how long the crab has been around and how important it is to us, we’ve only just begun to understand it. Marine biologists such as Dr. Yonathan Zohar of the University of Maryland Biotechnology Institute in Baltimore and Anson “Tuck” Hines of the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center in Edgewater are exploring the crab’s world, probing its life stages from tiny zoea to feisty adult and how it survives in a world of predators.

Zohar is the director of UMBI’s Center of Marine Biotechnology, and he’s optimistic that crabs can be raised in large numbers in man-made hatcheries and ultimately released into the Chesapeake to enhance the threatened spawning stock. Not all scientists embrace the notion of mass-producing crabs in captivity, but Zohar’s team has already tagged and released three-quarters of a million baby crabs. If funding holds out, he thinks the program can be a powerful new tool for fisheries managers trying to reverse population decline.

“The sky’s the limit,” Zohar says. “Or, actually, the water’s the limit.”



Hard to handle: Anna Jones picking crabs at J.M. Clayton Co. in Cambridge.
(photo by David Harp)


The crab study was launched in the summer of 2000 with financial backing from state and federal agencies, the Maryland Watermen’s Association, and Phillips Seafood. A more complete understanding of a crab’s basic biology and ecology, scientists believe, may be the last best hope for keeping the Chesapeake populated with enough crabs to keep the commercial fishery alive.

One of Zohar’s most curious challenges is to prevent crab-on-crab predation. To accomplish that, he’s looking for ways to induce synchronized molting among crab populations so that the crabs that have not shed their shells don’t devour the ones that have. Zohar points out that by nature, crabs are combative throughout their lives—except when it’s time to turtledove. When the female decides to mate, she exudes pheromones that alert male crabs, who temporarily regard her not as potential food but as a means of propagating the species. While the crabs couple, says Zohar, the male is actually protective of the female.

Coping with reduced harvests and competition from imported meat will require imagination if the local industry is to stay above water. In 1995, about forty or fifty seafood plants around the bay were licensed and equipped to pick crabs. Perhaps half that number remain in business today.



Jack Brooks of J.M. Clayton Co. shows off a a tray of “Baader meat”—finely ground “crab scrapple” left over after the bigger chunks of meat are picked.
(photo by David Harp)


If any processing house is likely to survive, it may be J.M. Clayton Co. in Cambridge. Billing itself as “the oldest crab house in the world,” it’s an operation that blends tradition and innovation.

During the regular season, watermen bring their bushels of crabs to Clayton’s by boat or truck. The still clattering, pinching cargoes are separated into two groups. The large, heavy crabs will be sent to restaurants to be steamed, probably that same night. The others, smaller or missing a limb or two, are dumped into steel steamers that cook at 250 degrees for twenty minutes. Once cooled, the crabs are wheeled into the picking room, where on a busy day as many as fifty-five women sit at stainless steel tables and separate by hand the meat from the shell. The work starts at 6 a.m. and, if there are enough crabs, continues for eight hours. A large sign reading SHELL FREE hangs from a far wall. Every ninety minutes or so, the pickers get up from their seats and weigh the meat they’ve stuffed into little plastic tubs. Jack Brooks, whose great-grandfather started the business, says an average picker can pack about twenty pounds of crab a day. The best pickers can reach forty pounds by quitting time.

Clayton’s used to sell its crabmeat to wholesalers and chain food stores, but was forced in the mid 1990s to scope out the high-end niche market because local processors could not compete with the imported crab flooding the country. One side effect of the rise of Asian crab is that many crab lovers have become convinced that the best crabmeat is solid white in appearance. If they wanted to, Clayton’s could produce a product that more closely resembles imported crab by washing away all the natural yellowish fat—“clean the crab down to its basic core” is how Brooks puts it. But they don’t. “Our crab meat is not snow white,” Brooks explains. “It has a beigey tint, and it’s sweet.”

With its niche market, J.M. Clayton may be better prepared than other processors to weather fluctuations in the crab harvest, but what has become an annual struggle to find enough crab pickers leaves Brooks pessimistic about the future of the industry. The days of depending upon local residents to fill seasonal slots in the picking houses ended with the appearance of fast food and motel chains and big box stores. Most of Clayton’s employees are Hispanic workers brought to Dorchester County under the federal H2B program that grants a limited number of temporary visas. Intended to help keep small businesses like Clayton’s operating, the H2B program has long been snarled in bureaucratic red tape and political contretemps over illegal immigration and border security. The result is that Clayton’s employees often have difficulty securing visas to return for the following season.

In the meantime, Clayton’s maximizes its operations by seeing that nothing goes to waste. Discarded shells are shipped off to another business that turns the matter into compost and fertilizer. And most everything else gets poured into a grinding machine called a Baader, after its German maker. What emerges from the other end is a greenish paste the consistency of dough. This so-called “Baader meat”—the crab equivalent of scrapple—is squeezed into heavy plastic bags, pasteurized for long shelf life, and distributed to restaurants, where it is used to flavor crab dishes and soup.

Standing beside the Baader machine, Brooks collects a small mound of the glop in the palm of his hand and sticks it in my direction. I dip in a finger and put the paste in my mouth. Aside from its wretched appearance, the stuff isn’t bad. In fact, it prompts an unexpected frisson of recognition. Lo and behold, here is pure essence of Maryland blue crab, the real unadulterated thing. And, like scrapple (“Everything but the oink and the curl in the tail”), it has everything but the pinch of the claw.



Janice Marshall of Smith Island.
(photo by David Harp)


The road to Smith Island changes from asphalt to water at the dock—what some old-timers still call the barrel wharf—in Crisfield. A lot of seafood has been loaded into refrigerated freight cars and trucks at this spot overlooking Tangier Sound. The trains are gone now, but when they arrived in the late 19th century, they put Crisfield on the map. Literally built out into the water on a foundation of empty oyster shells, this part of town was the commercial hub of a lucrative crab and oyster market that supplied restaurants in Baltimore, Washington, D.C., Philadelphia, New York City, Boston, and even as far west as Chicago.

Post-Civil-War gourmands who savored the delicious oddity of the soft crab created such a demand for the seasonal delicacy that hundreds of small boats clogged the creeks and shallow waters of Somerset County in search of crabs about to shed their shells. The crab, the oyster, and the locomotive turned what had been a mosquito-infested backwater into a boisterous town that sometimes more resembled the Wild West than the genteel Chesapeake Bay.

Crisfield still prides itself as the “crab capital of the world,” welcoming visitors with a giant red crab painted on the side of the town water tower. Most tourists are headed for Smith Island in Maryland waters or Tangier Island, just on the other side of the border in Virginia. Cars and vans are unloaded at the dock and all kinds of gear are stowed onto the boats that make daily trips to and from the island villages.

Time doesn’t stop at the Crisfield dock, but it does seem to pause. It was here, settled onto one of the wooden “liars benches,” that a Smithsonian Institution consultant named William W. Warner eavesdropped as the locals swapped news and rumors about crabs and other matters of local importance. Warner sat quietly, without notebook or tape recorder, and made copious mental notes, which he turned into the book Beautiful Swimmers, awarded a Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction in 1977. Drawing his title from the English translation of Callinectes, the book was and remains the seminal narrative of the bay crabber and the watermen’s culture. It might also be the best historical document future Marylanders have of a vanished industry.

Much has happened along the Crisfield waterfront since Warner stopped by; condominiums cast unfamiliar shadows along the waterfront where crabbers used to unload their day’s catch. But Warner would still find the dock an entertaining hangout.
One recent day, the captain of one of the Smith Island ferries watched as broad-backed men loaded his boat with boxes of canned goods and soft drinks destined for island cupboards. Nearby, an older woman dressed in a white top and pink capris clutched a taut leash attached to a small dog with bulging eyes and a nervous attitude.

“What’s his name?” the captain asked.

“Precious,” came the reply.

The captain turned to his mates and smiled. “Name’s Twitchy.”

The dog, shivering and shaking in the arms of a young island girl, rode the boat across Tangier Sound and was carried onto the dock at Tylerton, one of three Smith Island towns and the only one not linked to the others by road.

Janice Marshall agreed to meet me on the dock and lead me through Tylerton to the building housing the Smith Island Crabmeat Co-op. For generations, island women had picked the crabs caught by their husbands and sold the meat to mainland buyers. The meat was among the finest around the bay, but state regulators threatened in the early 1990s to shut down the cottage industry—the women picked crabs inside weather-beaten outbuildings behind their houses—unless it could meet strict health guidelines. Complaints about the meat had not come from customers, but from commercial packers in Crisfield who said they were being held to a higher standard. So the islanders grudgingly banded together, took out bank loans, and built a spanking new facility equipped with stainless steel tables, sinks, and other equipment necessary to appease state health officers.

On our way to the co-op, Janice poked her head inside a shanty where a retired waterman showed off his latest project, a model workboat fashioned from a piece of plastic he rescued from a worn-out refrigerator. He sells his little boats to tourists, who have become more and more important to Tylerton and its two sibling villages since the decline of the commercial seafood industry. With its scarred boats, the one-room shanties-on-stilts, and the backdrop of lonely marshes, the island is an artist’s dream world, a panorama of soft colors and hard luck.

In addition to the steamer room and the well-scrubbed picking and packing rooms, the co-op building boasts a small office where the women keep records by hand and a little hallway where visitors can purchase T-shirts and other memorabilia. The women follow the honor system, keeping track of how many bushels of crabs they steam, how much meat they pack, and how many plastic tubs they use. In addition to an annual $200 fee to belong to the co-op, the members pay for the use of the steamer and contribute $2 to a general fund for every pound of meat they extract from the hard crabs.

When it opened in 1996, a dozen or so women joined the co-op. Only half remain active today. Some decided they could not afford the fees and returned to illicit picking in their shanties. Others left because they just preferred to pick crabs alone. “You had to adjust to personalities and temperatures,” explained longtime member Dora Corbin—sometimes the air conditioner was set too high or too low to suit everyone.

It’s a poorly kept secret that not all the crab meat picked and shipped off Smith Island comes from the licensed co-op. It’s also widely known that lately, with the cost of hand-picked Chesapeake blue crab high even on the island, a few venturesome business owners are importing—yes, importing—foreign crab meat. This coals-to-Newcastle development is based purely on the market. The tourists who come to the island expect an indigenous meal, and they get it, kind of. But a Smith Island crab cake made from local meat would cost as much as $10—too high for many visitors, many of whom are retirees on fixed incomes. A $5 crab cake is more in line. And the only $5 crab cake on Smith Island is made from Asian crab.

Marshall splits her time between her native Smith Island, where her husband, Bobby, is a waterman, and Crisfield. She was lucky enough to find a job up the road at the Eastern Correctional Institution and does not have to rely entirely upon picking crabs for income. Most of the Smith Island pickers are not as fortunate. Like their husbands and brothers and sons who still work the water, they expect tough times this fall. Beginning September 1, new state regulations set lower bushel limits on the number of female crabs (or “sooks”) that could be harvested. A total ban on catching females kicked in on October 23.

In something of a milestone for crab preservation, Maryland and Virginia agreed early this year to reduce the harvest of females by 34 percent. The goal is simple enough to understand: The more female crabs not caught in pots and scrapes, the more left in the bay to spawn and to boost the overall crab population.



Bay morning: Bill James plies his trade on the Choptank River near Cambridge.
(photo by David Harp)


Islanders don’t argue the premise, but they and others in the lower Chesapeake complain that they are unfairly bearing the brunt of the new regulations. Traditionally, it’s been their windfall to harvest sooks migrating south at summer’s end. There is a rule of thumb on the water that commercial crabbers earn their expenses in summer and make their profits in the fall. By restricting the take of females, the state is cutting into the profits of watermen—and pickers—in Dorchester and Somerset counties. The Chesapeake Bay Seafood Industries Association, a nonprofit in Eastport that speaks for seafood processors and watermen, claims that the new regulations could cost crabbers and picking houses more than $21.6 million in lost revenues.

It’s an old tune with new lyrics: Islanders have long felt like they are being singled out by the policymakers up the bay. They’ve all heard the allegations that a Smith Islander is preternaturally inclined to catch the last crab and the last oyster in the bay. It’s not a characterization they like. And they can point fingers right back. Industry, crop and chicken farmers, and waterfront developers are the ones pouring chemicals and excess nutrients into the bay and doing more harm than the watermen, said Marshall, leaning against a stainless steel picking table. “You will never see a Smith Islander fertilize a lawn,” she said emphatically. “Why would we want to destroy our livelihood?”

In any case, the co-op members have a backup plan: They will turn to another state symbol to help earn a living. Earlier this year lawmakers adopted the Smith Island cake—a multilayered concoction baked on the island for years—as the official state dessert. If they can get the health department approval, the women’s organization may become the Smith Island Crabmeat and Cake Co-op.

Billy Clayton, his face weathered from years on the water, had finished steaming two bushels of crabs caught earlier by Marshall’s husband and walked into the picking room where the women talked about how scientists with college degrees and nice jobs were always telling the islanders about crabs.

Clayton said his father had one of the biggest crab houses on the island and kept daily records of where and how many crabs were caught. Crabbers have always had good times and bad times, the notes show. And, despite all the speculation, no one really knows why. “One thing I learned from my father,” Clayton said, “is soon as you think you got a crab figured out, he’ll prove you wrong.”

—Bill Thompson lives in Easton, Maryland. This is his first story for Urbanite.



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