Subscribe
Community
To protect or to serve?
Restoration efforts in bay watershed hope to give oysters a fighting chance
Friday, Nov. 20, 2009
 Click here to enlarge this photo Staff photo by JESSE YEATMAN
Watermen aboard the Miss Hannah out of Drayden harvest oysters from a bar in the St. Mary's River on Wednesday morning.
|
E-Mail This Article
The Maryland Department of Natural Resources estimates the Chesapeake Bay's oyster population now at about 1 percent of its peak size.
Oysters filter excess nutrients and pollutants out of bay waters. Without that cleansing action, harmful algae blooms grow, choking out the oxygen needed by marine life. Oysters once removed 133 million pounds of nitrogen from the bay annually. Today's population removes only about 250,000 pounds.
As recently as the 1980s, the bay still yielded robust, but declining, oyster harvests. An early-1990s outbreak of the parasitic diseases MSX and dermo ravaged the population, putting many shucking houses and watermen out of business.
A DNR report released in January showed some good news; oyster death rates fell for the fourth straight year in 2007, though preliminary 2008 data showed that reproduction was poor throughout the bay region.
The Oyster Recovery Partnership was established about 15 years ago to bring together different groups to work on a solution to address both the economic and environmental issues surrounding oysters. For the first five or six years the group worked only on small-scale production. In 2000, work escalated and there were some 30 million oysters planted at several locations in the bay watershed.
Since then, more reserves, where harvesting is limited, and more sanctuaries, where harvesting is prohibited, are being restored. This year the partnership coordinated planting 650 million oysters.
"You know you can do it," Stephan Abel, the partnership's executive director, said of the restoration effort. "The question is not can you. The question now … is where best to do it."
Better bottom-mapping technology now makes it easier to find spots that might be better adapted to restoration. High spots in the river and bay bottom can help deter sentiment buildup.
The group also looks for mid- to low-salinity areas where disease is less likely to take hold. But ultimately, a restoration effort that works well in one place may not in another, Abel said.
"If you lose the bottom, you have to bring it back somehow," he said. Part of the recovery effort includes hiring watermen to lay down old shell to give baby oysters, called spat, somewhere to attach.
Finding the balance between economic benefits for the oyster industry and the environmental benefits of oyster recovery can be tricky, especially since millions in public funding has gone to the restoration efforts, and more millions have gone to try to improve water quality.
In the end, it is cheaper to let the environment do its job as oysters reproduce naturally, Abel said. "We're trying to help Mother Nature jump-start itself," he said.
A call for sanctuaries, not harvesting
Raymond "Chip" Dudderar grew up around farmers on the Eastern Shore but is no stranger to watermen. He has followed the bay's declining health, from drops in oyster, fish and crab populations to the dirty waters that are sometimes deemed unsafe to swim. Dudderar is skeptical of the state's past oyster restoration efforts.
He was a member of the Patuxent River Commission for two years, but quit in 2008 because he said the group could not do what it needed to do to fulfill its task of cleaning up the river. At the time he proposed declaring the Patuxent a large-scale experiment by imposing a moratorium on oyster harvesting and turning the entire river into a sanctuary.
He said there are only a handful of local watermen who still harvest oysters in the Patuxent. Public funding needs to go to sanctuaries, he said, not toward subsidizing the oyster industry. He said the entire oyster industry, from watermen to shuckers to restaurants, needs to be held accountable and change its ways. "An oyster in the water today is worth far more to the public than an oyster in stew," he said.
Dudderar is also a member of the Coastal Conservation Association of Maryland's Patuxent River chapter.
"Our state position is there should be a moratorium on [harvesting] oysters growing on public bottoms," said Scott McGuire, president of the local CCA. He admits the position is not a politically attractive one.
He is OK with watermen harvesting off privately leased bottoms so long as it does not interfere with restoration activities.
"For whatever reason our fishery remains open despite the [oyster] population being down to 1 or 2 percent" of historic levels, he said.
Over the last two decades, the bulk of the money spent on oyster restoration in the Chesapeake watershed has gone to seeding public bars and managed reserves for later harvest, McGuire said. That has changed recently.
"The days of going out and harvesting the public bottom are probably numbered," McGuire predicted. He praised the watermen and associations that are willing to try aquaculture techniques and invest their own dollars into creating reserves.
The Oyster Restoration Partnership says its goal is 60 percent of oysters planted should go to sanctuaries, where harvesting is prohibited, and 40 percent toward plantings that will be available to harvesting in the future. This year 59 percent of the oyster seed has been devoted to sanctuaries.
"Those goals don't meet our ecological needs anymore," McGuire said. "If taxpayers are going to continue to participate as they have in the past, the goal needs to be revisited."
Dudderar, who said he generally does not like the federal government stepping in, said the state of the bay is so poor that it is time the feds take control.
While he said he doesn't want watermen to go out of business, "Public money should never be spent on any restoration activities that result in harvesting."
He said it would be fine for the state to grow the spat and in turn sell it to oystermen, but none should be used to seed publicly harvested bars.
Hatcheries like that at the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science Horn Point Laboratory in Cambridge can produce spat for about a penny apiece.
The lease program won't work because watermen poach from each other, Dudderar said. That is also one of the primary arguments by watermen against aquaculture and for the continued subsidizing of replanting oysters on the public bars.
Dudderar, who now lives in California overlooking the Patuxent River, recalled stories from his grandfather and growing up around farmers and watermen on the Eastern Shore. "I remember they'd say, ‘It's me against John Law,'" he said. "It is still a game."
Poaching hampers efforts, hurts bay
Almost half of the state's licensed watermen were cited for a DNR violation last year, including crabbing, fishing and oyster infractions, said Mike Naylor, DNR assistant director of fishery services. The latter included undersized oysters, harvesting off hours and poaching from sanctuaries. Penalties for fishing during restricted hours or taking more than the limit are so minimal that they do not act as efficient deterrents, Naylor said.
"Violations of our natural resources laws are higher than where they should be. This is a pervasive problem," he said.
While DNR is focused on increasing its patrolling efforts, budget cuts have led to a "greatly reduced" police force, Naylor said.
"We have fewer [officers] on the water now than we did a short time ago," he said. "There are fewer watermen. But the bay's the same size."
Legislation passed this year increases the penalties for certain violations and moves it to a point-based system, similar to traffic violations. One new law increases fines from a maximum of $500 to up to $1,000 for first offenses, and double that for subsequent offenses. Another allows DNR to suspend or revoke commercial fishing licenses.
"We don't encourage that. We're not going to tolerate that," Tommy Zinn, president of the Calvert County Watermen's Association, said of poaching oysters.
"There're some bad apples in every batch," he said.
While a waterman may pick up one violation for undersized oysters, Zinn said, he is most concerned about repeat offenders.
He estimated that fewer than 10 percent of Maryland's watermen have multiple oyster-harvesting infractions.
"The watermen are very reluctant to turn anybody in. They're a tight-knit group," Zinn said. "They'd rather DNR do their job and catch them themselves."
Zinn said he is afraid of vigilante justice on the water as more watermen begin leasing bars. "It's just a matter of time until there's going to be some conflict," where a waterman catches another illegally harvesting oysters on a leased bar.
As for the calls from groups like the Coastal Conservation Association to stop funding oyster plantings that can be harvested, he said it is working or cultivating the oyster bars that keeps them healthy. "The CCA is all about themselves. They're not concerned about the oyster industry," Zinn said.
One managed reserve bar had about 4,000 bushels harvested legally, but was later poached heavily when a waterman took somewhere between 3,000 and 5,000 bushels illegally. "It's just a few bad guys ruining it for everybody," Abel said.
Had those oysters been kept on the bar, it could have repopulated itself over time and could have sustained a long-term market, Abel said.
And when large amounts of oysters are taken off either reserves or sanctuaries illegally, it makes it hard to prove that the bar is thriving. "The restoration work could have been more successful than we realized," Naylor said.
"They can do a lot of damage in a very short time," Naylor said, especially at night or during the day in bad weather, when they bring in "foggy-day oysters." The watermen do often know who is harvesting illegally, but are reluctant to give up that information, he believes.
The state's aquaculture efforts "could be very, very successful," waterman Donnie Thompson of Hollywood said.
For that to happen, DNR must set strict limits that prohibit certain sized dredgers and hold oyster fishing to specific hours each day, he said. Most importantly, Maryland Natural Resources Police must enforce the limits and protect oyster bars from poachers, who with big enough equipment and a few hours under the cover of darkness can do major harm to a harvest. "Some of these places have been wiped off the map by a handful of individuals," Thompson said.
Pollution doesn't help
Development associated with the population boom in much of the Chesapeake's watershed has increased pollution running into tributaries and the bay itself.
Naylor said everyone tries to blame someone else, whether it is about runoff from farmers' fields, overharvesting by watermen or increased sewer and septic waste from development.
"Everybody's part of the problem and we all need to be part of the solution," Naylor said.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency earlier this month provided the six states in the Chesapeake Bay watershed and the District of Columbia with rigorous expectations for jurisdictions to reduce pollution in streams, rivers and the bay to meet water quality standards.
The standards set new daily load limits on pollution from point sources and nonpoint sources to cut back on the nitrogen, phosphorus and sediments that flow into the bay and its tributaries measured in two-year benchmarks.
EPA expects that by 2017 pollution controls will be in place that should result in approximately 60 percent of the required reductions. States and the District of Columbia must also offset any increased loads from population growth and land-use changes anticipated in the coming decades.
With that in mind, "the ecological value of an oyster is greater than its economic value," McGuire said.
The CCA ventured into oyster restoration efforts starting last year and raised about 31,000 oysters in floats offshore of a residence on St. Thomas Creek in St. Mary's County. This past September the group placed the oysters on a privately leased bar across the Patuxent River in Helen Creek. "We're creating that lease as our de facto sanctuary," McGuire said.
The group will not harvest any of those oysters but instead will let them stay to populate the bar and work to filter the water.
"We wanted bottom inside the creek where people can keep an eye on them because poaching is a big problem. We're investigating options right now" to find other areas, he said.
The group has been successful in recruiting waterfront homeowners to help raise the oysters and has participated in the state's Marylanders Grow Oysters program, where spat are raised in cages from homeowners' piers before being planted on sanctuaries.
"People are real excited about growing oysters. They would prefer they stay in the same creek" as where they are raised, he said.
Two diseases which rampaged through the oyster population over the last several decades, MSX and dermo, are still prevalent, but is less so now. "There is no such thing as resistant, but [the oysters that remain] are tolerant," Abel said.
Over the last decade sanctuaries and managed reserves have been built up in waters with lower salinity. The diseases are less virulent in these waters, but the oysters are less likely to reproduce.
The oyster restoration effort is starting to move in to higher salinity water "to find that balance," Abel said.
Abel said the group has not so far done any plantings in the Potomac, in part because that river has its own oversight via the Potomac River Fisheries Commission.
There is hope, though. Tributaries off the Potomac, especially the St. Mary's River, what is considered a trapped estuary, are doing well in terms of oysters, he said.
"It's phenomenal. The St. Mary's doesn't need it," Abel said of reseeding.
Coming next Friday: How oystering and the economy affect each other today.
Staff writer Sean R. Sedam contributed to this report.
