From Kent Narrows to the Po Delta: one crab, two very different stories

I live near Kent Narrows, Maryland—but I’m from Emilia-Romagna, where the Po River fans into the Adriatic. In both places, water shapes identity and work. Yet the same species tells two opposite stories. Here in the Chesapeake, the blue crab is a heritage fishery struggling through one of its lowest population counts on record. Back home, that same crab has become an invasive predator devouring clams and mussels, threatening a hundred-million-euro industry.

This shared fate captures what I work on every day: how markets and ecosystems intertwine. The solutions that help watermen in Maryland—responsible aquaculture, demand for invasives, better habitat data—are the same tools that could turn crisis into opportunity in the Po Delta. Two estuaries, one crab, and a reminder that economic recovery and ecological balance are the same story told in different tides.