| $58M Oyster Restoration Buried in the Mud |
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| Written by Heather McKee | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Monday, 09 June 2008 | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Oyster lovers, put down the lemon wedge and tabasco for a minute and take note. The molluscan delicacy is all but vanishing from Chesapeake Bay, even after $58 million dollars of federal and state money have been poured into their restoration over the past fourteen years. A few months ago, Envirovore reported on decimated blue crab populations in the Bay. Like the infamous blue crab, oysters have been overharvested, and those that manage to avoid our dinner plates languish in the deoxygenated waters of the Bay, thanks to fertilizer and manure run-off and resulting algal blooms.
A survey of Chesapeake Bay in 2007 showed that only 12% of the Bay had acceptable levels of oxygen for marine life such as oysters. And the spread of nasty little foreign protozoan parasites are also taking their toll on already imperiled oyster populations.
But instead of looking harder at stemming Bay pollution, $58 million in restoration dollars has mainly been used to create artificial reefs that oyster larvae could settle and grow on. Normally, oyster larvae would settle upon established oyster beds, creating clumpy reefs that provide habitat for numerous ocean dwellers - but overharvesting and sedimentation have left a scraped-clean, inhospitable ocean bottom.
Unfortunately, artificial reef efforts have not been successful - researchers say most of the manmade reefs are not tall enough to allow larval settling spots above the muddy sediment of the Bay. Only one Corps of Engineers project in Virginia had some success with artificial reefs that were over a foot tall. (And of course, those oysters that settled and survived were immediately harvested.) Through all of this, oyster businesses are decreasing with the oysters. In Maryland, there were 2,000 oyster fisherfolks in the 1980s, and just 530 in 2006. A proposal in the neighborhood of $100 million dollars exists now to provide money to farmers to reduce their pollution run-off, but rampant chemical fertilizer use and manure spreading will likely not be stemmed by a few bushes along the riverbank. In a depressingly “toss-in-the-towel” mentality on restoration efforts in the Bay, state governments have begun to recommend farming oysters instead of wildharvesting - an expensive process that many fisherfolks simply can't consider an option. Via Washington Post
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