Delaware Bay blue crab counts expected to drop, again

If the state’s 2024 juvenile index is any indication, the number of Delaware Bay blue crabs caught in 2025 will be down for the fourth straight year.

Rich Wong, a biometrician for the Delaware Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Control’s Fisheries Section, presented the data during an Advisory Council on Shell Fisheries meeting March 4. He’s projecting 2.8 million pounds of blue crab will be caught this year, which is down from about 3.1 million pounds caught in 2024.

The factors for the decline are not well known and there’s no smoking gun, said Wong in an interview following the meeting. It tends to be cyclical in nature, and right now, it’s in a bit of a trough, said Wong.

The projection for 2025 is based on the juvenile index taken last fall. During the meeting, Wong presented data showing that since at least the late 1980s, the juvenile index taken in the fall does a pretty good job of predicting the amount caught the following year.

When it’s off, it tends to be under-predicting, said Wong. Sometimes it hits the nail on the head, but sometimes it’s off by 12%, he said.

Environmental factors and weather play a significant role in the number of blue crabs in Delaware Bay.

A lot of the bay’s blue crabs start their lives as larvae near the mouth of the bay, said Wong. They are flushed out to the ocean and then pushed back into the bay through weather events, like a nor’easter, he said.

“We don’t know how climate change is affecting this,” said Wong.

For now, Wong said he’s not concerned with the drop, but it’s definitely being monitored because there’s been a decrease in the Chesapeake Bay’s blue crab population over the past few years for yet-to-be-determined reasons. The state wants to make sure these aren’t the early signs of what’s being seen there, he said.

According to a May 2024 press release from the Chesapeake Bay Foundation, that bay’s blue crab population experienced a record-low estimate of 227 million crabs in 2022, 323 million in 2023 and 317 million in 2024.

There’s a lot of interest to see the number of crabs caught this year in Delaware Bay, because the state doesn’t want to stay down for too long, said Wong. The blue crab commercial fishery is larger than all the other fisheries in the state combined, he said, adding the number doesn’t include crabs caught in the Inland Bays, because that’s all recreational.