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Miller, who also serves on the Chesapeake Bay Stock Assessment Committee, said the shortage would have made more sense if it had come around September, when the juvenile crabs grow big enough to enter the fishery. The conditions are relatively benign I don’t think there’s any environmental condition that could be driving it,” said Tom Miller, a professor of fisheries science and director of the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science’s founding campus, the Chesapeake Biological Laboratory in Solomons, Md. While it’s normal for the blue crab population to fluctuate from year to year, no one’s certain what caused this year’s steep decline. The cause of the shortage is something of a mystery.Ī winter dredge survey showed the overall population fell from 405 million in 2020 to 282 million in 2021, driven largely by a sharp drop in the number of juvenile crabs, which hit their lowest level since 1990. While the coronavirus pandemic shuttered restaurants and battered the blue crab industry last year, 2021 has brought more bad news: Prices skyrocketed due to a shortage of blue crabs in the Chesapeake Bay, long a top producer of the "beautiful swimmer," a species distinguished by its bright blue claws ( Greenwire, April 22, 2020).