Roles and Abundance of Blue Crabs in Chesapeake Bay Ecology

This photo was taken at a seafood restaurant in Annapolis, MD, and shows two blue crabs in a basin of water being pumped from the nearby river. Blue crabs are a famous Maryland food and are eaten by a lot of people. This obviously affects the species abundance, as the more crabs people harvest to sell and eat the less will remain in the ecosystem. To prevent overfishing---or in this case, overcrabbing--- regulations are in place including having a size limit on which crabs it is legal to catch and which ones need to be thrown back. This helps to prevent the blue crab population from shrinking too severely to the point where it disrupts the surrounding ecosystem, the Chesapeake Bay. Therefore, this picture of crabs being kept at a restaurant after having been caught and removed from the wild connects to the ecological concept of species abundance, which is linked to crabbing and crabbing regulations.

This picture also relates strongly to the Sustainable Development Goal of Life Below Water. Obviously, blue crabs are marine organisms, but less obvious connections exist as well. In order to reach the goal of marine sustainability, it is necessary to have good regulations in place to protect the populations of marine organisms such as the blue crab. The species abundance of marine organisms such as the blue crab that are important to sustaining the health of a marine ecosystem are critical to and interconnected with the Sustainable Development Goal of Life Below Water, and both of these things are represented by this photo.

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