1748                            JOINT RESOLUTIONS

the crabs that are sought by the Virginia dredgers in what is called
the winter dredging season. About 85% of the crabs so caught are
adult females that have been impregnated.

Members of the General Assembly of Maryland long have believed
that the heavy catch of pregnant female crabs while in a dormant
or semi-dormant stage in Virginia waters inevitably has reduced
the supply of adult crabs in Chesapeake Bay waters during the two
following years.

This cause and effect relationship is not yet proved, but it also is
not yet disproved. To the State of Maryland, the Virginia practice
of dredging egg-bearing female crabs during the winter months
seems an obvious reason for a decreased supply of adult crabs.

In a recent hearing, the Director of the Maryland Department
of Chesapeake Bay Affairs made these statements about the possible
effects of the Virginia winter dredging season:

"Statistics of the winter dredge fishery provide some inter-
esting comparisons. Comparing the 1960's with the preceding
30-year period, the following statistics are notable: (1) the
number of vessels engaged in the winter dredge fishery has
almost doubled; (2) the harvest of crabs in the winter dredge
fishery has increased by 128 percent; (3) approximately one-
quarter of all the crabs caught in Virginia during the 1960's
have been taken in the winter dredge fishery, 41 percent more
than previously, and in 1963 more than one-third of the total
Virginia catch was taken in the winter dredge fishery; (4) the
percentage of the total Chesapeake Bay catch of crabs taken in
the winter dredge fishery has increased by 65 percent.

"It is noteworthy also that 3 successive years of drastically
reduced winter dredge catches in 1957, 1958, and 1959, when
the annual harvest from the source was less than 50 percent
of the average for the preceding years of the decade, were fol-
lowed by an immediate and dramatic increase in abundance of
crabs that persisted for a period of 8 years, during which bay-
wide production increased 38 percent over the annual average
of the preceding 10-year period.

"These statistics, of course, prove nothing, but if taken to-
gether with the very significant and unprecedented increase in
harvest of crabs during the current decade, I believe they do
raise a serious question as to whether Maryland and Virginia
may not be overexploiting our common crab resource, and
whether Virginia may not be overexploiting it at a time when
it is not only particularly vulnerable to overfishing, but when
the species is at a crucial stage of its life history. Admittedly,
there is no experimental evidence that the number of spawning
female crabs in a given year is directly related to the number
of progeny that reach maturity in subsequent years. Unless,
however, it can be shown that the mortality rate of the larval
and juvenile crabs is a density-dependent factor, the contention
that the number of spawning females has no relationship to the
number of surviving progeny is insupportable, an