Most of the residents of eastern North Carolina that live near the waters of the Pamlico Sound have commented on how few crab pots they’re seeing in our waters this year. Commercial crabbers that depend of the population of blue crabs for much of their annual income are having a tough time catching a profitable number of these crabs, even though number one jimmies are bringing up to $3.00 a pound at the crab houses.

What’s going on?

Curiously many fishery biologists from many of the southeastern U.S. think that the conditions left by Hurricane Irene in 2011 are now contributing to the decrease in blue crabs in the Pamlico-Albemarle Sound.

Hurricane Irene’s storm surge hit our area at the exact time many red drum were spawning, driving the fertile eggs up into the same shallows and backwaters that juvenile red drum favor as their “nursery” area. In other words, Irene set the stage for a very successful red drum spawning in the summer of 2011.

Couple that successful spawn with the unusually warm winter of 2012 that followed and many of the juvenile red drum, which would have usually migrated into the offshore waters over the winter, stayed put in the Albemarle/Pamlico area.

Many fishery biologists feel that juvenile young drum feed heavily on the young blue crabs that essentially occupy the same water and during the spring and summer of 2012, red drum (along with a good population of other predatory fish such as the striped bass) had a field day with the now abundant young blue crabs. As the fish grew fat the population of blue crabs went into a decline.

The same ideal spawning conditions for the red drum that Irene brought about in eastern North Carolina also caused many of these juvenile red drum to migrate northward along the Atlantic seaboard and into the Chesapeake Bay. Another potential player in this shift in the population of red drum may be climate change.

A 2013 article in the Chesapeake Bay Foundation’s magazine quotes Bill Goldsborough, the chief marine biologists with the Foundation, as saying that “Global warming could potentially shift more of this usually southern fish (red drum) into the (Chesapeake) Bay. I do think that there are climate change effects wrapped up in this shift in the population numbers of red drum in the Chesapeake Bay area. People caught red drum off Cape Cod last year. I’ve never heard of red drum being north of New Jersey before.”

During the summer of 2011, in the Maryland waters of the Chesapeake Bay alone, sport fishermen reported catching and releasing over 240,000 undersized red drum. In summers before that, hardly any red drum were reported.

During the winter of 2011-2012, biologists estimated that there were over 581-million juvenile blue crabs in the Chesapeake Bay, the highest numbers recorded in over 20 years. Yet, the number of adult blue crabs harvested in 2012-2013 was very low. This indicated that something was causing this dramatic decline in the numbers of crabs harvested. Fishery managers feel that this could indicate that predatory fish, such as striped bass and red drum, may be involved in the dramatic decrease.

Biologists have long known that seldom, if ever, do populations of fish remain stable. Something, be it man’s influence through sport or commercial fishing or natural causes such as storms or possible climate change, causes constant shifts in the numbers and species of fish being caught. This year’s apparent low numbers of crabs being caught in the Pamlico-Albemarle areas may be the result of a very healthy population of red drum, striped bass, or even the dreaded cow nose rays which also feed heavily on shellfish.

Sport fishermen are happy with what looks like a healthy increase in the numbers of red drum and other predatory fish, while commercial crabbers aren’t happy with low numbers of crabs. Fishery managers are caught in the middle of the controversy. One might wonder what would happen to the populations of our marine resources if, for some reason, man’s influences on these resources could be totally removed?