Like steamed crabs? Like crab cakes? Better eat a blue catfish now and then.

One more follow-up to my Friday column on invasive fish species: Marylanders and Virginians can do their part to support the blue crab population in the Chesapeake Bay by eating blue catfish. There are too many of them in Chesapeake waters and they eat a lot of blue crabs. Here is some information I gathered from Maryland’s Department of Natural Resources:

A study by the Virginia Institute of Marine Science used blue catfish population estimates in the lower James River to try to estimate how many blue crabs the fish were eating there per year. They estimated blue catfish are eating about 2.34 million blue crabs per year in that river.

Another study, published last year in Marine and Coastal Fisheries, examined the predatory impacts of blue catfish in the James. That study estimated blue catfish ate about 400 tons of blue crab in the James River in a single year, the most of any food source. That represented about 4.2 percent of the statewide harvest of Virginia blue crab.