Bad news for seafood lovers hoping for a bite of crab plucked from the bottom of the Chesapeake Bay: Maryland’s crab industry is reporting a shortage of the clawed crustaceans this summer, reports WJZ in Baltimore.

As tourism peaks for a long July 4 holiday weekend, restaurants specializing in Maryland crabs are telling customers to arrive early if they want a taste of the local haul. Crabbers in much of the bay area are already struggling to meet demand.

One leading reason for the run on crabs is the weather. An unseasonably warm spring caused a rush in orders, WJZ reports, causing the best stock of adult crabs to be depleted well before the long days of summer arrived:

Lynn Fegley is with the Department of Natural Resources. She confirms the shortage crabbers are seeing. Another reason for the shortage is the warm spring, which caused a widespread craving for the crustaceans.

“The adult crabs, the big crabs that were present in the bay at the beginning of the seasons, there are fewer of them now because they’ve been fished on,” Fegley said.

But news of a crab shortage might strike some as a bit of a surprise just a few months after Maryland and Virginia proudly announced that the blue crab population in area waters was as large as it has been in two decades. That’s still the case, but the rub is that of the population of 764 million crabs—according to a study released in April—far fewer are adults ripe for fishing, cooking and eating. Too many of the crabs discovered earlier this year are still too juvenile to be picked from the ocean and delivered onto diners’ plates.

Of course, that doesn’t mean restaurants won’t drop “Maryland” crab dishes from their menus. Thing is, not all crabs advertised as being from the Old Line State actually hail from there. The Washington City Paper recently reported that despite their heavy promotion of crab cakes and related plates, many restaurants get their crab meat from more far-flung locales.