Protecting the 'Beautiful, Savory Swimmer'
Richard Forward's Blue Crab Research Crucial to Saving Habitats
and to Setting Sustainable Catch Limits
By Tim Lucas
Steamed,deviled or lightly
breaded and pan fried,nearly 43 million pounds of North
Carolina blue crabs landed on American tables last year.
Demand for the tasty crustacean—whose Latin name, Callinectes
sapidus, means “beautiful,savory swimmer”—grows each year,along
with concerns that overfishing and loss of habitat from
coastal development and pollution may send the fishery into
decline.
Research by Richard B. Forward Jr. is helping to prevent
that.
Forward is professor of zoology and Bass Fellow
at the Nicholas School. From his modest, book-strewn office
at the Duke University Marine Laboratory in Beaufort, he heads
one of the East Coast’s most respected and prolific research
programs on marine crustacean physiology and behavior.
“Blue crabs have a very complex life cycle,”
he says. “As swimming crabs, their migrations take them from
coastal rivers, to estuaries, to offshore ocean waters, making
them very difficult to track.”
Over the past decade, he and his research team
have published 25 papers that shed new light on the species’
life cycle and its surprisingly acute sensory capabilities—especially
its response, during migration, to light, currents and chemical
cues in the environment.
The information they have collected is being
used to develop models that allow fishery managers to predict
future blue crab populations and set sustainable limits for
commercial catches.
It also is being used to identify important
habitats in coastal estuaries such as sea grass beds and salt
marshes, which must be protected if North Carolina is to retain
a healthy blue crab fishery.
“We’ve lost nursery and adult blue crab habitat
in recent years,” Forward warns. “If overfishing occurs—and
there is some data that suggests it is just about to start—it
could compound the effects of habitat loss and our blue crab
fishery could go into decline, like the fisheries have in
the Delaware and Chesapeake bays.”
page 1 | 2
| 3 | 4
| 5 |
