Abundance Estimation of the Chesapeake Bay Blue Crab, Callinectes sapidus

This study is to estimate abundance of the Chesapeake Bay blue crab stock. Using 823 dredge tows which were conducted during the 1991 winter survey, blue crab abundance was estimated on the basis of newly developed methods which account for unequal dredge tow distances, size- and sex-specific heterogeneous overwintering spatial distributions, wintertime exploitation, the time period of quasi-hibernation, and dredge capture efficiency. The estimate of total abundance before correction by gear efficiency was 131.8 million crabs $(95\%\;C.I.\;=\;118.2\;million\;crabs\;to\;145.4\;million\;crabs),$ Dredge capture efficiency was estimated to be 0.474. Thus, the estimate of total abundance was calculated as 278.1 million crabs after correction by the efficiency factor.