Oysters caught in economic, environmental battle

Our Opinion

Friday, Nov. 20, 2009

Here's the dilemma. The oyster harvest in the Chesapeake Bay and its tributaries has dwindled to a fraction of its former glory and would barely exist at all if the state were not growing and replanting baby oysters at a furious rate and at considerable expense.

Meanwhile, the water quality of the bay continues to deteriorate, and one reason is because there are fewer oysters in the water to filter out pollutants. In colonial times, the Maryland Department of Natural Resources has estimated, oysters could filter all the water in the Chesapeake in a little more than three days. Now it takes more than three years.

So the question becomes just what the state's oyster recovery efforts are trying to accomplish. Is the goal to restore the oyster population as part of the effort to improve water quality? Or is the goal to keep watermen delivering oysters to the table?

Right now the answer is both, but these two goals are in conflict. The reasons why, and some of the options being considered, are explored in an article on the front page today, and will be examined further in another article next Friday.

Those whose primary concern is for the environment argue that it makes no sense for taxpayers to spend millions of dollars directly on oyster restoration efforts, and tens of millions on bay cleanup efforts, and then allow watermen to take these oysters from public waters for personal gain, especially since the oysters are needed to filter out pollutants.

Those whose primary concern is preserving a traditional Chesapeake industry point out that working the oyster beds, as watermen do, is necessary to keep them free of sediment and alive. Besides, they say, it is disease, not overharvesting, that has decimated the oyster population.

The current solution calls for the majority of recovery money to go to planting oysters in sanctuaries, where harvesting is prohibited. The rest is split between managed reserves, where oysters are permitted to grow and filter water for an extra year before they are harvested, and public bars, where watermen can catch all that are of legal size during the regular season from October through March.

This plan is as much a political compromise as it is a scientific strategy. It was worked up by reasonable and knowledgeable people.

But it can't fully take into account the effects of nature and humans out on the water. Heavy rains can wash sediment into the water, covering oyster bars. Dry weather can create conditions that encourage the spread of two diseases, MSX and dermo, which kill oysters.

A handful of watermen with no regard for the future of the oysters that provide their livelihood can raid sanctuaries when no one is looking, stealing in a few hours protected oysters that took years to grow.

So the struggle continues to find the right approach. To abandon the struggle is to let the oyster fishery and the oysters themselves be buried by neglect.