638 State Papers and Addresses

CRAB CONSERVATION CONFERENCE
DEPARTMENT OF INTERIOR

March 24, 1942
Washington D. C.

AT A time when every effort is being directed toward increasing the produc-
tion of food stuffs for our armies, our civilian population, and our allies,
we find our off-shore fisheries on both coasts and in Alaskan waters materially
curtailed by enemy activity. This situation seems to place especial emphasis
on the importance of developing to the highest degree of productivity the fish-
eries in the protected areas of our bays and rivers.

Such action would appear to be especially important in the case of those
fisheries which, on the basis of our past experience and by reason of their
biological cycle, are susceptile of being rapidly built up through the adoption
of sound conservation measures.

The Chesapeake Bay Blue Crab which is the subject of this conference
today, falls clearly within this classification. With its tremendous reproduc-
tive capacity, a single female producing an estimated total of 3, 000, 000 eggs, it
has, in the past, responded with amazing rapidity to the adoption of protective
measures. In addition to the increasing general demand for all types of food
stuffs, there would seem to be a particularly important place for seafoods in
our National diet at this time due to the elements! essential to health which
they so abundantly provide.

Furthermore, the exclusion of Japanese crab meat from American markets
and the introduction of new techniques for preserving crab meat, which have
been developed in recent years, have had the effect of greatly extending the
available markets for this important seafood.

In any consideration of the status) of the crab fishery at this time, there is
quite a general agreement concerning two important facts. First, that there
has been a very rapid and marked decline in the crab population in the Chesa-
peake Hay in the past two years, and that it is now at an extremely low level.
Second, that our Chesapeake crab population is shared exclusively and jointly
by the two States of Maryland and Virginia and that it is within the power of
either State to draw on this joint crab account to such an extent as to threaten
the complete deduction of this valuable natural resource.

I am encouraged to believe improvement can be brought about by a review
of the upward and downward movement in our Chesapeake crab population
during the course of the past two decades in apparently direct response to the
adoption) and relaxation of various conservation measures. During the early
twenties the industry found itself in the trough of a heavy decline. The annual
catch receded from approximately 50, 000, 000 pounds in 1915 to less than half
of that quantity in 1920, with only a slight recovery of a few million pounds
by 1925.