Killin Me Softly

I love crabs. I could sit for hours on my deck with a cooler full of Coronas and just break crabs all up with my teeth (those little wooden mallets are for suckas!) and enjoy the sweet juicy meat inside. When I was little, it was a summer time ritual to eat crabs wrapped in newspaper on one of the apartment buildings stoops. All the kids in the neighborhood (about 13 of us) would pool our money and get as many crabs as we could from the neighborhood bar on Thursdays. Crabs then cost $0.50 each.

Lately I've been reading articles and catching news reports about the decline in the crab population along the Chesapeake Bay. I have learned, since moving to the DC area, that the Bay itself is in danger due to the increase in pollution to the Bay, mainly agricultural pollution.

Delaware and Maryland have always been great places for farming communities. However over the past 40 years there has been increase in large production farms. Not your "Mom and Pop" farms where you can go get some milk and ice cream (like Broom's in Bel Air, MD) but your big assed farms like Purdue and Morningstar Farms. These place have hundreds of thousands of animals (chickens and cows) and all of them need to shit, and need to have grain and corn to eat (which are treated with pesticides and other chemicals). These chemicals and shit unfortunately end up in the bay when heavy rains come and washes them away into streams or when they are mismanaged and seep down into groundwater below the farms.

I know what you thinking, "WTF does this have to do with crabs?!". It's simple, polluted water= warmer waters= less crabs being produced. Just like people, crabs have to have the right environment to reproduce and the Bay right now is not the right environment.

People in the crab industry thought this was part of the crabs cycle. Crab populations decline sometimes but they usually come back within a couple years. The decline we are in now started in the early 1990's and has contributed to a 65% drop in crab production! Right now, they say there are about 43.5 million pounds of crabs available Bay wide. You know how big the Bay is?! It stretches over 6 States!!!

I see bumper stickers all the time that say "Save the Bay!". They even have the Save the Bay Maryland License Plate , where proceeds from the purchase of the plate goes towards saving the Bay.

But folks, even if you can't relate to saving the Bay, we can all relate to saving some crabs!!! Damn I'm hungry........

Brown Tip

WIPE ME DOWN!!!

Stop washing your car in your drive way! Since most of us live along the Bay (yes the Potomac leads to the Bay so it's the same thing) when we wash our cars outside the pollution from your dirty cars and it's oil goes down the sewer to.... the Bay! Taking your car to the car wash can save water and reduce pollution runoff to the bay since most car wash places (not the shady ones) have storage tanks under the facility for wash water.