Ask a Blue Crab: If You Want to Thrive, First You Need to Survive

Ask a Blue Crab: If You Want to Thrive, First You Need to Survive

Dr. James J. S. Johnson

When a man hath taken a new wife, he shall not go out to war, neither shall he be charged with any business; but he shall be free at home one year, and shall cheer up his wife whom he hath taken.   (Deuteronomy 24:5)

Chesapeake Bay blue crabs, like young men, do well to avoid combat –at least until they have had a decent opportunity to procreate the next generation.  To thrive, first you must survive. And, for populations, that means surviving long enough to become parents.

That’s true with every lifeform God made, from people to pinnipeds, from cranes to crabs.

Consider, for example, how this works with human populations – as the Biblical quotation above (Deuteronomy 24:5) illustrates.

To protect the population success of the Hebrew people, after they escaped slavery in Egypt, God provided a population-protective law – a newly married man was not to be assigned combat duty until he had one year at home, to spend a lot of time with his wife. From a population growth perspective, this is only “common” sense, because reproducing members of a population need to survive long enough to procreate – otherwise how can the local population thrive?  (Actually the reality seems to be fairly uncommon in many nations, nowadays, where human population growth is negative.)

And yet the same idea applies to local populations of blue crabs —  a multi-million dollar industry in the Chesapeake Bay – which is the largest bay in the world.

As with humans, for a blue crab population to thrive, surviving (long enough to reproduce) is the first and most basic requirement. If enough young adults don’t live long enough to procreate the next generation , don’t expect population stability – much less population growth!  And the yo-yo-like roller-coaster populations of Chesapeake Bay blue crabs illustrate this fact every year.

A good prognosis for Callinectes sapidus [i.e., Chesapeake Bay blue crab] The comeback for the [Chesapeake] Bay’s most valuable fishery [i.e., Chesapeake Bay blue crabs] is exactly what the experts predicted.  The 2016 wintertime survey estimated there were 553 million blue crabs in the Bay, a 35 percent increase from last year’s [i.e., AD2015’s] tally and the highest population in four years [!@].  The number of spawning-age females was estimated to be 194 million — below the recommended target of 215 million, but double what it had been the year before [i.e., AD2015].

The comeback for the Bay’s most valuable fishery [i.e., blue crabs!] is yet another sign that harvest restrictions placed on both states [i.e., Maryland and Virginia] in 2008, while painful for the crab industry, may be helping the fisheries to bounce back. Among the cuts crabbers absorbed:  limits on the number of bushels of female crabs they could take in a day, seasonal closures in Maryland of the fishery for female crabs and a complete closure of the Virginia winter dredge fishery, which overwhelmingly focused on female crabs.

[Quoting from Rona Kobell, “Crabbers, Scientist Seeing More, Larger Blue Crabs This Spring”, Chesapeake Bay Journal, 26(5):11 (July-August 2016).]

It is noteworthy – in light of the Mosaic avian wildlife protection law in Deuteronomy 22:6-7 (which prohibits the predatory taking of nesting female birds found in the wild)– that protective conservation of females is the key to reproductive success of blue crabs – and thus also to the Chesapeake crustacean’s population stability and population growth.

While scientists hoped that crabs would recover quickly and watermen wanted the restrictions loosened, the story wasn’t quite that linear. The crab population rebounded, more than doubling from 2008 to 2010, but then it slumped again.  The juvenile crabs dropped dramatically in 2013, from 581 million to 111 million [!].  Scientist didn’t know the cause [from the slump], but some watermen suspected many were gobbled up by an influx of red drum [fish, which is a predator of blue crabs – especially red drum juveniles that hunt for crabs in the Chesapeake Bay’s shallows] into the Bay.  Others thought many crabs expired in oxygen-poor water [perhaps due to extra-warm water, which holds less dissolved oxygen than does cooler water].  Whatever the reason, the 2013 results were indicative of a yo-yo population that’s tough to manage.

Crabs are notoriously unpredictable, cannibalistic creatures that typically live less than three years. They reproduce prolifically, but their survival depends on a number of external factors, beginning with favorable winds to blow the larvae back into the Bay after their eggs hatch.  They also need thick underwater grasses for habitat; until recently, sediment from rainstorms and algae blooms from excess nitrogen and phosphorus [e.g., phosphate waste] have blocked the light [that otherwise shines through the surface water] that [submergent] aquatic vegetation needs to grow.

But this year [i.e., AD2016], researchers at the Virginia Institute of Marine Science and Maryland Department of Natural Resources reported the greatest extent of Bay grasses [in shallow waters] they’d seen in three decades. Canby [i.e., C. J. Canby, a crabber who fishes 500+ crab-pots near Annapolis] and others who frequent the Bay say the water is clearer than they’ve seen in a long time, and data bear that out, at least in some areas of the Chesapeake.  . . .

Canby’s traps were fuller than any June he recalled. The skittering crabs were a beautiful blue, and so large that his customers were asking him to sort them into several sizes instead of just mixed bushels.  . . .   “They’re getting bigger,” Whalen [i.e., Bruce Whalen, manager of Cantler’s Riverside Inn, a crab house near Annapolis] said of this year [i.e., AD2016]’s crabs.  . . .

Better oyster harvests in the last several years have brought more watermen back into the [Chesapeake Bay’s oyster] fishery. Some conservationists worry the same thing will happen eventually with crabbing should the [blue crab] population bounce back, but Canby doesn’t think so.  It’s hard, unpredictable work, and it’s expensive, he said, what with the price of [crab] pots, bait and manpower increasing.  And sometimes, the wind blows blustery and the chop doesn’t stop and the equipment breaks down and the person you would call to fix it is … you.  “You gotta love this,” Canby said, “because there’s a lot of better ways to make money.”

[Quoting from Rona Kobell, “Crabbers, Scientist Seeing More, Larger Blue Crabs This Spring”, Chesapeake Bay Journal, 26(5):11-13 (July-August 2016).]

In other words, vulnerable crabs need shallow-water vegetation to hide in, so they are less of a visual “target” for predators, such as Red Drum fish. [ See also, regarding Red Drum [Sciaenops ocellatus] fish juveniles, Karl Blankenship, “The Mystery of the Missing Blue Crabs”, in Chesapeake Bay Journal, 23(8), page unknown  (posted 11-6-AD2013), at http://www.bayjournal.com/article/the_mystery_of_the_missing_blue_crabs .]

So, there you have it – something as simple as having lots of clear, sunshine-filled shallow water, in the shallows of the Chesapeake Bay, makes all the difference for blue crab population successes.

If the crabs have sufficient hiding-places, where they can evade potential predators, they can survive long enough to procreate – in the millions each spawning season.

Déjà vu!  —  surviving (long enough to successfully reproduce) is unsurprisingly critical, for thriving as a local population.  That’s why wildlife protection statutes often allude to “critical habitats” (i.e., the habitats where reproduction of the next generation either succeeds or fails), not just any habitat (such as a migratory stopover, or a winter home).

God is the inventor of habitat factors that provide protection from potential predators — as well as the provider of defensive survival traits (ecologically employed by prey populations, “fitting” them to avoid their predators).

Accordingly, Biblical creationists can appreciate this simple reality:  as the all-wise Creator of the uncountable complexities of every living creature — from people and pinnipeds, to cranes and crabs  —  God deserves credit for SURVIVAL OF THE FITTED.

PHOTO CREDITS:

Newlyweds embracing:  Chuck Espinoza (copyrighted photo used per Fair Use statute)

Blue Crab on Carolina blue background:  Virginia Institute of Marine Science

Blue Crab in net: NOAA

Blue Crabs in bushel:  Calvert Beacon  https://www.calvertbeacon.com/chesapeake-bay-blue-crabs-beginning/

Blue Crab in underwater grass:  Jay Fleming (copyrighted photo used per Fair Use statute)

Blue Crab underwater, near grass:  Harris Seafood (photo used per Fair Use statute)

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Bogus Brachyurans and Counterfeit Creationists

Bogus Brachyurans and Counterfeit Creationists

Last summer, in Baltimore, I enjoyed eating “Chesapeake Bay blue crab”—but was that what I actually ate? Why am I suspicious?  Blue crab, the Chesapeake Bay’s most iconic edible species(1), also appears to be its most impersonated.

A report released April 1 [2015] … found that 38 percent of crab cakes labeled as local on menus in the region were made of an entirely different species of crab, predominantly one imported from the Indo-Pacific region.  In Annapolis and Baltimore, nearly 50 percent of “Maryland” and “Chesapeake Bay” crab cakes were mislabeled.(2)

Before getting crabby about such false advertising (a type of bait-and-switch deception), such crustacean counterfeiting should be verified.  How can portunid pretenses be proven?

“I’ve put a lot of seafood in my purse over the last few years,” said Dr. Kimberly Warner, author of the report(3) … [referring to] crab cake samples that she and other testers collected [and] shipped to a lab in Florida that determined whether the cakes contained blue crab, Callinectes sapidus, and, if not, which species were used instead.  Warner said the fraud rate of 38 percent is a conservative estimate. … Mislabeling “is being done because it’s easier to sell a Maryland crab cake than one from the Philippines or Vietnam” [said Steve Vilnit, of Maryland’s Department of Natural Resources].(2)

Dr. Warner lamented that bogus brachyurans are part of a treacherous trend of tricking taste-buds:

Maryland’s favorite seafood dish is not safe from a bait and switch. When diners are expecting the fresh, distinctive flavor of the Chesapeake blue crab, they may instead be served a completely different species, shipped from as far away as Indonesia. … This mislabeling rate is consistent with Oceana’s previous studies on fish and shrimp. In 2013, Oceana found that one-third of more than 1,200 fish samples were mislabeled according to [USDA] guidelines. We also found 30 percent of shrimp samples to be misrepresented to consumers in a similar study in 2014.(3)

Many restaurants, buffets, and sushi bars are swimming in similar seafood scams.  Piscatorial masquerades include pollock playing cod, icefish as anchovies, tilapia as grouper, rockfish as red snapper. Customers, who eagerly eat what is falsely advertised as “albacore” (or “white tuna”), may experience a digestive insult: the look-alike meat of escolar fish (a/k/a “snake mackerel”) is wax-loaded and promptly produces a blasting vermillion diarrhea.

So, buyer, beware seafood mislabeling.

Yet there are worse bait-and-switch scams to warily watch out for, such as “creation apologetics” ministry mislabeling. Not all that is called “Biblical” origins science is genuinely true-to-Genesis.

Some unfaithful-to-Genesis organizations overtly disclose their “creation-by-evolution” doctrines. However, most do not conspicuously admit it, when compromising the Bible’s record of origins.

But you can recognize real messages, of ministries or “experts”, by their compatibility with Genesis.

Does the advertised “creation” teaching follow the uniformitarian dogma (and eons of “deep time”) of deists Charles Lyell and James Hutton?  Is it closed-Bible deism, wedged under another name, such as “Intelligent Design Movement”?  Embracing millions/billions of years means sacrificing Genesis truth – a “huge loss” – the high price for listening to a “wolf-mouth”.  Does the so-called “Christian apologetics” teaching, like the syncretism of William Lane Craig and Norm Geisler, incorporate Monsignor Lemaître’s “big bang” theory?  Does it presuppose death before Adam, like Alexander Winchell (or William Dembski), within some kind of pre-Adamite “hominids-morphing-into-humans” scenario?  Or, does it promote the animistic “natural selection” idolatries of Charles Darwin and Thomas Huxley?  Or does it do the equivalent, defensively, by trying to shield “natural selection” sophistry from debunking, proffering “genes-in-magic” bluff-and-bluster substitutes for real-world genetics?  (See 1st Timothy 6:20.)

Amazingly, as some atheists whisper their doubts about the bait-and-switch mantra “natural selection”, de facto theistic evolutionists(4) zealously defend “natural selection” as if it were a Hindu’s sacred cow or Roman Catholicism’s “sinless” Mary (Isaiah 8:20).  Where are the Berean creationists?

So how should we then live – and discern between true and false?  When scrutinizing the true ingredients—crab or shrimp or tunafish—in seafood cuisine, forensic genetics can detect the telltale DNA of the seafood actually sold. However, when scrutinizing whether an “apologetics expert” is truly a Biblical creationist, compare what those “experts” teach, specifically, with what the authoritative text of Scripture teaches (Acts 17:11).

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References

(1)William W. Warner, Beautiful Swimmers:  Watermen, Crabs and the Chesapeake Bay (Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1994, Back Bay edition), 394 pages.  This classic introduces the Chesapeake Bay’s Blue Crab and the people whose livelihoods depend upon those “beautiful swimmers”.

(2)Whitney Pipkin, “Nearly 40% of Blue Crab Mislabeled in Chesapeake Area Eateries”, Chesapeake Bay Journal, 25(3):7 (May 2015).

(3)Kimberly Warner, Beth Lowell, et al., “Ocean Reveals Mislabeling of Iconic Chesapeake Blue Crab” (April 2015), 15 pages, posted at http://usa.oceana.org/sites/default/files/crab_testing_report_final_3.27.15.pdf .

(4)For example, in an ongoing (and  tragic) argument with an under-educated “natural selection” defender/advocate, on September 4th of AD2012, I wrote the following: “At the risk of being misinterpreted as simplistic, please note that a further complication of the peer review process [which all-too-often amounts to only a veneer-review process] is the simple fact that neither you [as an astronomer] nor [your cell biologist ally] have a forensic science expertise background.  Neither of you have served as a trial judge, making what are called ‘Evidence Rule 403 calls (mentioned below], i.e., to critically reject — or to approve — the usage of ‘conventional’ terminology as to its communication accountability when describing evidence, as I have since AD1996.  In other words, if we compare the creation-vs.-evolution debate to an ongoing courtroom contest, — and at times it can be educationally helpful to do so, — it makes sense that an advocate’s deceptive usage of terminology should be spotlighted and labeled for what it is, deceptive, — such as when a party tries to use bait-and-switch wordplays on the jury.  (It’s not just evolutionists who do this; e.g., Emergent Church pastors use misleading terminology all the time.)  Thus, the specific jargon at issue (i.e., ‘natural selection’) does involve biologists, to be sure, — but the thrust of the apologetics perspective is that how conventional terminology is used often indicates truth-vs.-falsity reliability (regarding the information or concepts being represented).  It is the accurate-vs.-misleading communication accountability issue that benefits from a forensic perspective, in order to expose how evolutionists use terms that are confusing and likely to mislead.   . . . Ironically, my main problem with the specific phrase ‘natural selection’ is linked to instances when I was required, as a judicial officer of the State of Texas, to make ruling that applied Evidence Rule 403, which is a rule that is used (inter alia) to bar otherwise-admissible evidence (including well-established professional jargon) if the tendency of that specific jargon is to be so inherently misleading that whatever communicative value that it may have, as industry-accepted terminology (to “insiders”), is outweighed by its semantic tendency to confuse communication about the relevant underlying facts to outsiders, — rather than to transmit accurate, relevant, precise information.  Typically a jargon objection is sustainable, under an ‘Evidence Rule 403 call’, when the objectionable term itself does not clearly match the underlying reality that it is supposed to represent, such that usage of the jargon (even though it may be ‘accepted’ jargon in the industry) is likely to mislead and confuse the evidence presentation.  An example of this is the case of Godard v. Alabama Pilot, Inc., 2007 WL 1266361, *1 (S.D. Ala. 2007), where the federal judge disallowed the use of the professional jargon “seaman” because its semantic ambiguity was interfering with the inquiry’s analysis of the core evidence.  . . .   [please review and show due respect for my earlier article posted at http://www.icr.org/article/dna-rna-providential-coding-revere/ ).”