The haul comes aboard for the crew of this Smith Island-based tonging boat. Now three centuries in, tonging for oysters is reaching a critical point, with watermen and their livelihoods at stake versus the vitality of the entire oyster population. Photo by Lisa Shires
“The world is your oyster” is a time-worn idiom, presumably meaning that “you” have all the benefits and potential to be successful in all your endeavors—to figuratively find that elusive “pearl” inside the mollusk’s shell when you pry it open. The phrase evolved from William Shakespeare’s The Merry Wives of Windsor, in which Falstaff exclaims: “I will not lend thee a penny.” To which Pistol replies: “Why, the world’s mine oyster, Which I with sword will open.”
Our hunch is, the Chesapeake Bay watermen who harvest them for their livelihood, and those of us who consume the tasty products of their labor, couldn’t care less what Shakespeare thought about oysters. The reality today is that the bay oyster population has dwindled by half of what it was 20 years ago. But if a region-wide alliance achieves its lofty goal, everyone benefits: watermen, consumers, and the bay itself.
An Expansive Alliance of Like-Minded Partners
The Chesapeake Bay Foundation has gathered a total of 42 different partner organizations—from localized conservation organizations and educational institutions to commercial seafood distributors—to form what it calls the Chesapeake Oyster Alliance. Stemming from the latest in a series of four Bay Watershed Agreements dating between 1983 and 2014, Maryland and Virginia have now committed to restoring oyster reefs in ten bay tributaries.
This is intended to be a multi-year campaign that will spark governmental action, public attention, and funding (from federal, state, corporate, and private sources) to accelerate ongoing oyster-restoration efforts in the bay. The ambitious goal of the collaborative effort is to add 10 billion oysters by 2025 (known in inner circles simply as the alliterative 10 Billion in 2025) in the waters of both states.
The timeline is based on efforts that will run through at least that year. If the alliance is able to hit the 10 billion goal, it will trigger significant multiplier effects for the bay’s oyster population through higher and more stable “spatsets” (for laypeople, larvae that become baby oysters) that further grow the population. The cultural and economic benefits will include cleaner water for health and recreation (a product of the oyster’s natural filtration function), increased fish and crab habitat, and a flourishing seafood industry.
The 10 billion oysters will come primarily from large-scale restoration efforts in Maryland and Virginia, but will also include contributions from the aquaculture industry and a smaller amount from other sources including fishery repletion (efforts in Virginia and Maryland to “restock” for annual commercial harvesting).
An oyster-restoration effort in the immediate Annapolis area is also now under way. The Oyster Recovery Partnership, sponsored by the Maryland Department of Natural Resources and with partners including the Chesapeake Bay Foundation, the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, launched the well-publicized “Operation Build a Reef” with the Severn River Association just last fall.
The target is to secure funding for sanctuary reefs between the Severn River and Naval Academy bridges. A donation of $100 will supply one bushel of “juvenile oysters” that have been “farmed” from recycled shells and spat to be planted in the reefs on the floor of the river.
Sanctuaries’ Legislation Battle
In the closing days of the state’s legislative session in April, a bill co-sponsored by the late Michael Busch, then-speaker of the Maryland House of Delegates, and Paul G. Pinsky, Senate Education, Health and Environmental Affairs chair, proposed law protection of already established Department of Natural Resources oyster sanctuaries in five bay waterways: Harris Creek, Tred Avon, Little Choptank, St. Mary’s, and Manokin rivers.
Advocates for watermen who want to harvest parts of the sanctuaries rotationally have lobbied hard for the state to ease restrictions. In a guest column titled “Oyster Partnership at Risk” for The Capital in April 2015, marine consultant and environmentalist John Flood wrote about a group of watermen called the Clean Chesapeake Coalition, saying their claim is, “if they are allowed to power-dredge oysters without restriction, they can restore oyster habitat and oysters in the bay. They testified that oysters will then clean the bay for us,” Flood wrote. “But oysters can’t filter the bay from a bushel basket headed to market.”
Governor Larry Hogan, who must have at least partially bought into the watermen’s claims, cited the legislative measure as “bad policy, bad for our watermen, and worst of all, bad for the Chesapeake Bay” and vetoed the bill. But the General Assembly overrode Hogan’s action, passing the bill into law. Several environmental organizations have come out in support of the recent legislation, and they have scientific evidence to back it up.
What the Alliance Says About Sanctuaries
Audrey Swanenberg, manager of the Chesapeake Oyster Alliance, suggests “experience, adaptive management, and cutting-edge science are teaching us more about restoration every year. But the task is huge.”
She laments that thousands of dredge vessels “systematically destroyed the Chesapeake oysters’ three-dimensional reefs, one reef at a time. Rebuilding them on 25 percent of the bay’s bottom is a one-at-a-time process, but setting aside that amount of our oyster bars for their huge ecological contributions is a responsible use of this public resource that is consistent with the science of marine reserves.”
Swanenberg also said that “we must continue expanding the restoration effort whenever we can while reducing costs as we develop operating efficiencies.” Not only will such efforts rebuild habitat and water filtration, but emerging science helps explain how those restored sanctuary reefs produce healthy oyster larvae for wind and tides to disperse to build new, stronger generations of oysters on harvest bars as well as sanctuaries.
Also critical, according to Swanenberg, are rigorous management plans, including monitoring, that govern and direct sanctuary reef construction and planting in both Virginia and Maryland, along with “strict law enforcement to counteract oyster thieves who are willing to damage a public resource for private gain.” At this juncture, she estimates, restoration programs are planting roughly a billion oyster spat each year in Maryland and Virginia, “so there is definite growth potential in this sector.”
Byproducts of a Robust Oyster Population
Swanenberg tells us that “we cannot have a restored Chesapeake Bay without oysters...A healthy adult oyster filters up to 50 gallons [of bay water] a day and improves water quality across the bay. And oyster reefs provide homes for crabs, fish, and dozens of bay species. Fortunately, progress is being made...Restoration efforts are working. Oyster farming businesses are growing,” she claims.
Bay oyster restoration progress has indeed been accelerating based on advances on five interlocking fronts: improvements in water quality, advances in ecological restoration, increasing disease resistance, growth of aquaculture on leased bottom, and scientific management of wild harvest. But without an ambitious collaborative effort like the Chesapeake Oyster Alliance, the efforts, according to the Bay Foundation, will likely fall far short of truly restoring the species.
By generating new legislative, donor, and public enthusiasm, this campaign will allow the collaboration to accelerate efforts that already show tremendous promise for the bay’s oyster population, while also bringing new partners and approaches to this rapidly evolving field.
Recognizing the uncertainty around the bay’s oyster population and the difficulty in actually measuring numerical progress in restoration and public fisheries, the partners will set milestones in each of the key workplan focal areas (restoration, aquaculture, and public fishery management) and track them in a manner that allows for annual reporting.
Many groups, including the Bay Foundation, have contributed to the success of Chesapeake oyster restoration efforts to date, and even in the face of federal funding cuts, those efforts will need to be maintained and even accelerated if the 10 Billion by 2025 effort is to succeed. Well cognizant of the importance of legislative and public involvement, the foundation has been taking the lead in pulling together the Chesapeake Oyster Alliance framework and collateral materials and plans to continue to market the campaign strategically to legislators and others who will help make the 10 billion goal a reality.
From the Oysters’ Mouth
Federal, state, and local scientists working on the bay oyster case agree that the situation is grave, but worth attempting to fix. In March, the Anne Arundel County Watermen’s Association convened an “Oyster Symposium” at the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center outside Edgewater. Introduced by the association’s president, Bob Scerbo, program experts included Dr. Eric Schott, associate research professor for the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science (UMCES) at its Institute of Marine and Environmental Technology; Chris Judy, Shellfish Division Director for the Maryland Department of Natural Resources; Jeff Holland, West and Rhode Riverkeeper for the Arundel Rivers Federation; and added guest Dr. Michael Wilberg, a fisheries science professor at the Chesapeake Biological Lab for the UMCES.
Scerbo said that the press coverage of the bivalves’ plight “very seldom” covers the science behind it all. “The idea [for the symposium] was to round up some fishery scientists to actually get the information from the oysters’ mouth,” he said.
While each of the presenters illustrated the trends and causes in the fluctuation and more recent downturn in the oyster population, Wilberg’s information—gleaned largely from a recent 600-page stock assessment he helped to write—seemed to provide the most compelling assessment.
We’ve reached a point at which the population of the shellfish has dwindled by half since 1999. According to Wilberg, “The collapse of eastern oysters in Maryland waters of the Chesapeake Bay is among the largest documented declines of a marine species.”
Why the collapse? Besides overfishing and disease, habitat loss is also a key factor, says Wilberg in one of his studies. “Every time an oyster leaves the water,” he points out, “a piece of the habitat that oysters and other bay species need is also lost. Between 1980 and the time of the study three decades later, suitable habitat declined about 70 percent.” The good news, Wilberg adds, is that “Maryland has made positive steps toward conserving oysters by increasing the area that is off limits to fishing and increasing support for aquaculture.”
So, the world very well could literally be our oyster—but only if we make the right choices in a delicate balancing act that satisfies both the needs of those who plie the local waters and the rest of us who consume the fruits of their labor. With efforts like the 10 Billion by 2025 initiative, it appears we can ensure that one of the main components of the bay’s bounty will not only survive, but thrive.
