![]() To restore the crab to its living splendor, Meredith had to fashion a new set of epoxy-resin claws by taking a mold from another (slightly smaller) male crab. These two factors made mounting the crab a serious challenge for Eastern Shore taxidermist Arty Meredith, and help explain the lengthy hiatus between its capture and its upcoming appearance in VIMS' Watermen's Hall Visitors Center and Aquarium. In addition to its disproportionately small claws, the crab had also just molted, so its external skeleton was relatively soft. Crabs possess the useful ability to regenerate lost limbs. That's because it had tiny claws that had just started to re-grow after the crab somehow lost its original pair, "probably in a fight with another male blue crab when it was smaller," says van Montfrans. Juveniles typically molt about 20 times before reaching maturity.ĭespite its impressive width, the crab posed little threat to the McKinney's fingers. The first juvenile stage of the blue crab measures about 1/10 of an inch across the spines. "The average width is around 5 1/2 inches," says van Montfrans. The minimum legal width for a male blue crab is 5 inches. The big "jimmy" dwarfs most Chesapeake Bay blue crabs. It weighed 1.1 pounds and had a 10.72-inch-wide shell. McKinney caught the crab on the Virginia side of the Potomac. Willard van Engel, crab experts at VIMS, say it's the largest blue crab they've ever seen or heard about, and may set a Chesapeake Bay and Virginia record. When waterman Clarence "Juice" McKinney pulled his crab pot from the frigid waters of the Potomac River in November 1998, he got a big surprise-staring back at him was a male blue crab that stretched almost a foot between the tips of its lateral spines.
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