It was late last September when 73-year-old farmer Archie Page pulled a six-inch blue crab out of his pond in Swansboro, NC. After catching it, Page spent the day parading around in his pick-up with the crab in the back. "I couldn't believe it," he says with a soft Southern twang. Two months later, standing on a rickety dock at the edge of the blue-green pond, he still laughs at the memory. "I showed that thing around until it died," says Page, gazing out over the pond, its shores now lined with wire crab traps. The single crustacean pulled from his pond suggested that an unusual experiment to save the blue crab might actually work.
In the last 15 years, crab populations along the Eastern US seaboard have declined by 65%, says Yonathan Zohar, director of the Center of Marine Biotechnology at the University of Maryland Biotechnology Institute. This area ...
