But the blue crab in Panacea, Florida, has its own history, and that is worth relating. Years ago crabs were fished in Panacea with a long line, a coarse hair rope that was baited with salted bull-noses. It was a stinking, unpleasant mess, but the fishermen put out the thousands of yards of hair rope and bait along the marshes and up the Ochlockonee River working from skiffs. Flies buzzed noisily overhead, and when a summer breeze came along, the fishermen were pleased to get relief from the odorous bait.

The mile-long lines were set and buoyed with an inner tube, one at each end. The salted bull-nose was cut into long thin strips and looped every two feet over the coarse hair rope, and it worked very well. Great big sleek male blue crabs came out of the marshes and up from the muddy bottom, perched on the line and shredded the tough bait with their large claws. The "jimmies," as the big males were called, were prized because of their large size; often they were more than seven inches across the carapace. The fishermen usually worked lines at night with lighted gasoline lanterns. They eased along with their boats, lifting the line and shaking the crabs into weather-beaten fish boxes. The catches at night were better than in the day because the crabs were stunned by the blazing light while they were devouring the bait, and clung to the lines. Nonetheless, all that lifting and shaking was hard work. The catches were lucrative, and a crew of men was able to bring in as many as 40,000 pounds of crabs in a single night.

At the end of the fishing trip when they finished running the lines, they had to coil the rope into a big tin washbasin and sprinkle salt on it to keep the bait from rotting. By the time they reached the dock, unloaded and often helped boil the crabs at the crab house, they were exhausted.

One day a man came down from Virginia and started crabbing. He didn't use a set line, but brought rolls of chicken wire, and began shaping them into wire crab traps, which the residents had never seen. He told them there was no need to fish all night; they could stay home and "make love to the baby's mama." The people of Panacea were skeptical, but he started off into the sunrise one morning with his traps and a box of threadfin herring. The traps worked, they caught crabs while he stayed on the shore: they did all the work for him.

The fishermen immediately began buying rolls of chicken wire and building traps. The population of Panacea soared as it never had before because the men now stayed home at night. Fishermen were bringing in crabs by the ton - the crab traps enabled them to fish in foul weather; they were making more money with less effort, so to make even more money they built bigger boats and bought more powerful outboard motors. Of course their expenses soared and they had to work all the harder to pay for expensive gear.

Suddenly crab houses like weeds began to spring up all over Panacea. A crab house opened in Apalachicola and East Point, and down in Perry, Florida. Everybody started crabbing, even college students had traps set and made extra money. As the industry prospered, the crab houses installed giant steel steamers, erected bigger buildings with more tables where more women could pick more crab meat. One man, with technology from the industry in Maryland, put in a gigantic freezer plant so meat could be stockpiled.

In the middle 1950s and mid-1960s the crabbing industry boomed. The crabs seemed to be unlimited out in the bay, and it was nothing for a man to come back with 3000 or 4000 pounds of crab in a single day's catch. One man and his two sons broke the record and brought in 6500 pounds of crab, working 350 traps in a single afternoon.

Trap after trap would be snatched up, emptied of its contents and rebaited. Fisherman worked night and day striking schools of menhaden and selling them to the crab houses which sold them back to the crabbers at double price for bait. The men worked seven days a week, twelve hours a day and got while the getting was good. The wire traps were set in shallow estuaries around the marshes to catch the male crabs, as well as offshore where the females congregated. The traps have a bait cage with two or more funnels that lead into it. The crab, smelling the decaying fish within, crawls about the sides of the wire-meshed trap until it finds the opening to the funnel and crawls in. As many as forty pounds of blue crabs can end up in a single trap, although the average catch is much less.

The crabbers worked year round, in calm seas and stormy surfs; the ambitious one pulled their traps in freezing pouring rain, wearing yellow-and-black slicker suits. It didn't matter whether they caught males or females, small or big there were no closed seasons, no size limit and no conservation laws. Gravid females carrying sponge-egg masses were pulled out by tens of thousands of pounds. The crab houses cut the price on gravid females by two cents on the pound because the sponge, which was thrown out at the fish house, jacked up the weight, but the crabbers went right on pulling their traps. Periodically the fish houses drastically cut the price of the crabs. The fishermen griped but kept working.

The fish houses bought new equipment, the owners built bigger and better houses, bought tractor-trailer trucks to haul crabmeat and fish up north, and still the price kept falling. The landing where the crabbers went out in their skiffs looked like a crowded parking lot. The water was jammed with boats, littered with rotting bait, conchs and spider crabs discarded from the traps, and the oyster-shell ramp above the boat landing was covered with rusted-out pick-up trucks and old cars that busily roared up and down the rutted sand roads with noisy mufflers at all hours of the morning.

When the prices were high the crews would return to the dock exhausted but happy. They helped each other unload their weighted skiffs, piling the crabs into the old trucks, which sagged on their axles. They backed their trucks up to the loading ramps of the crab houses. Stone crabs were culled out, their claws broken off, and they were cooked and sold as epicurean delights.

Into the small hours of the morning the great cookers steamed and hissed as tons upon tons of blue crabs were killed and cooked, and dumped out on tables. Even with steadily declining prices the fishermen's economy boomed, their wives and children picked the meats, and refrigerated trucks roared out of Panacea, hauling the meat to New York, Maryland and Philadelphia markets.

When the price dropped below four cents a pound, the fishermen grumbled and told the fish-house owners they couldn't make a living. They had to catch an even greater quantity of crabs to pay their bills. After a few years the traps produced less and less from overfishing, and the checks at the end of the week were leaner and leaner. Where the rock-landing boat dock was once jammed with boats and cars, only a few remained, because the crabbers started going to Pensacola and even to Louisiana and Virginia, where the crabbing was better and the prices were high. But nonetheless, the existing crab stocks seemed to drop to nothing in a very few short years. The packing houses laid off the women; only the fastest pickers stayed on. Eventually the industry disappeared almost entirely, and for many years it was difficult to find any quantity of crabs at all in the bays.

It is not a bad thing to exploit a stock of marine organisms if proper conservation measures are practiced. A female blue crab produces 100,000 eggs-and under good conditions, lots of marshes, proper salinity, temperature and pH conditions, low pesticide levels, the crabs will multiply and thrive. But Wakulla and Franklin counties in north Florida have always resisted conservation efforts.

Attempts to place closed seasons in Florida and prohibit the taking of sponge females were stopped cold by vote-hungry politicians. In these two beautiful but backward areas, there are few nursery ground areas I closed to shrimping and no size limits are placed on speckled trout! The state of Florida set up a state aquatic preserve system that I would prohibit the use of state-owned submerged lands for land-fill I and development, and prohibit shell mining and oil rigs. More than 20 : aquatic preserves around the state had been proposed and accepted by the communities, but the Ochlockonee River Aquatic Preserve was killed by opposition from the county commissioners, politicians, and developers and fishermen who feared it would -close these areas to fishing sometime in the distant future. At a local public hearing the conservationists were outnumbered three to one.

I cannot help but be depressed by the area's future. Panacea is not a Hudson River community where people have seen progress, factories and buildings until they want to vomit, and are now gallantly fighting to save what precious little bit of life is left in the overburdened waters. In Panacea the conservationists are a pitiful minority, voices crying in the wilderness.

I stand on my dock looking out at the green marshes of Fiddler's Point across the bay, one of the areas that so many want to turn into a gleaming white sandy beach, motels, neon lights and high­rise apartments. The marshes are worth fighting to save, and so are the crabs. There are still a few crabs that crawl up on the pilings of my dock, and children come down to fish for them with a string and a fish head, just as I did years ago when I first moved to Florida. There is a difference though, it takes them all day to get a Styrofoam picnic chest full. Little more than a decade ago, when I was just a boy with time on my hands, it took only an exciting hour to snatch up a heaping bushel of blue crabs. Fishing for blue crabs is a poor man's sport because it takes only a little bait and string. The crab chews on the bait, gets all engrossed in its meal, and is too greedy to let go or is too engrossed in its meal to feel itself being lifted from the water and then rudely dumped into a bucket. And then it's dumped into scalding hot water. The blue crab with its frantic greed and big appetite readily enters traps, as the people who once caught them for a living soon will enter their own particular traps in their pursuit of the developer's fast buck.

There is only one hope for the estuaries in north Florida, and that is a federal coastal zoning law that will protect productive marshes from future development. There is talk of such a bill in Washington, but if something is not done soon it will be too late for north Florida. If the environment is not substantially altered and conservation measures are placed on gravid females, the bumper crops of blue crabs may come back again the way I remember them almost 15 years ago when I first moved to Florida.

There are still a few crabbers who go out every morning and make a modest living at it. Even though the community has changed there are still a few houses that have crab traps piled up in their front yard. Fishermen keep tunnelboats and crabbing skiffs at the city dock. There should be crab fisherman because the blue crab is delicious and wonderful to eat and there should be plenty of them for everyone.

Blue crabs (Callinectes sapidus) make wonderful research material because they are alert and responsive animals. Scientists study their eyes, their nervous systems and their reproduction, and in past years we have shipped them out by the hundreds. They make excellent scavengers for large aquariums and will eat anything that lies dead on the bottom. It is perhaps the most vicious and alert crab to be found anywhere, no sooner does your hand approach one than it stretches its long, pinching claws up at you, pincers extended and ready to latch onto your fingers. Crabbers use a special set of crab tongs that is most efficient at picking them up; only they latch on the tongs and the pincers must be undone or the chelae will break. When they are particularly disturbed or the chelae is damaged, the crab autotomizes and the leg stiffens and breaks off. They will regenerate a new one after a time.

They use their chelae for shredding their food, which they ravenously stuff into their mouths and in almost no time a blue crab can tear a fish to pieces, enthusiastically gobbling it down. If there is no fish to eat, they eat each other, and in a collection of crabs it is a constant struggle for survival of the fittest. If one is damaged, immediately they all converge upon it and rip it apart.

They have the right to be so defensive because I know of few marine animals with the exception of shrimp and lobsters that are so eagerly sought for food. Aside from man doing his usual job of gathering something tasty by the ton, sharks, sea turtles and any large fish eat adult blue crabs. The young are hungrily swallowed by smaller fish, rays and birds.

The young tend to live in shallow water, amidst the seagrass meadows, up creek beds and at the head of the bay where they can burrow into shallow mud. They are in the process of molting generally, particularly during the summer months, and are eagerly sought after by another grade of commercial fishermen. The soft-shell-crab fishing industry gathers the peelers by the thousands, keeps them in vats of running or recirculating sea water, and just as they molt out of their shell, they are removed and frozen. The soft-shell crab can be fried in its entirety, shell and all, and makes a tasty meal.

One of the primary difficulties in raising soft-shell blue crabs is keeping the hard crabs from tearing the soft crabs to pieces and devouring them. A man in the crab business must be constantly on the watch, removing the soft crabs as quickly as they molt.

When a number of crabs are taken by traps or by net and tossed into a bucket, you can expect the biggest mess of tangled, pinching crabs imaginable. Each crab has latched onto the leg or body of the adjoining crab, and if you lift one crab out there may be a chain of a dozen other individuals attached.

When collecting crabs for specimens where all limbs must be intact, it is necessary to keep them isolated from each other. They readily tear off appendages and pinch themselves to pieces. This is particularly true during transport when crabs are being shipped across country. A good technique, we found, is to wrap them individually in wet paper towels, covering up their eyes. Blocking their sight is most important, for once they are blind they lie still. If they are in a shallow tank and you walk anywhere near, immediately they raise their claws defensively and snap at you. And should you venture too close to the tank and forget about them, you might receive a savage pinch.

The stone crab (Menippe mercenaria) reminds me of the great Old Man of the Mountain. There the crab sits in his burrow with his great massive claws folded up in front of him daring anyone to come close. The stone crab in the south is prized as a great delicacy. Fishermen collect them, break the claws off and throw the crab back. If they survive that long in a defenseless condition, they will regenerate new massive claws over a period of a year. Farming stone crabs has been the interest of numerous entrepreneurs because the claws fetch close to two dollars a pound, but the rate of growth in the crab, according to investigations at the University of Miami, has proved too slow and cumbersome for commercial use.

So they are captured in crab traps along with blue crabs. In certain localities a wooden slat trap that resembles a lobster pot is used. In either case, if the trap is set on a bottom of flat lime rock or oyster reef, chances are it will get quite a few stone crabs. They dwell in crevices and small caves with only their massive brown claws tipped with black sticking out.

When you approach one it quickly draws back into its burrow. A good collector, wearing canvas gloves, can reach into the burrow and snatch the stone crab out. But you've got to watch those claws. Some of them are a full eight inches in length and so strong that the crab uses them to crush oysters, grinding the shell to bits with one claw, scooping out the meat and putting it into its mouth with the other. Actually, no one has lost a finger from a stone crab to my knowledge. I know several crabbers who have received some vicious pinches from them, severe black-and-blue marks, but have not lost a finger. At one point I was digging around in our gravel-filled tanks for some specimen or other, and my finger found its way into the clutches of a monster stone crab and nearly got mangled.

A word at this point-when any big crab latches onto your finger, the worst thing you can do is snap the claw off. Even though you're in pain, the pain will be worse if you do so, because the claw gives a spasmodic tightening when suddenly broken off. The best thing to do is place crab, hand (or toe) and all, into a bucket of water and let it relax and it lets go of its own accord. Or you can take careful aim with a hammer and crush the claw at the base of the first joint where the muscle attaches. But if you miss you may be worse off than before. I remember one captain on a shrimp boat who had a big Portunus grab onto his toe. Shouting, he ordered the crew to bring him a bucket of water, and gently edged the crab into the bucket. Presently the crab tired of holding on and let go. The captain, in a rage, kicked the bucket over and stamped the crab to pieces.

Blue crabs, other portunid crabs and sluggish bottom-dwelling crabs can be the predominant part of a shrimp-boat catch. Therefore, it is very important that a fisherman protect his hands and other parts while culling through the catch. In the Gulf, I knew one deckhand who encountered a great deal of distress, all of it his own doing.

He had leaky pants, and parts of him were hanging out. And as he squatted over the catch taking out handfuls of shrimp, a blue crab reached up and grabbed a claw-full and hung on. The shrimper jumped and leaped and howled and hopped up and down the deck, supporting the crab with his hand but not daring to pull it off. Presently the rest of the crew, holding their sides with laughter, fetched him a bucket of water and the crab and the attached parts were placed in it. After what was described as a very long time the crab let go.

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