The bay’s bounty
Oyster population boom shows Chesapeake Bay cleanup efforts producing results
As the Chesapeake Bay oyster season winds down, word is that this year’s commercial harvest should be the largest in three decades. That’s encouraging, especially when you consider that the numbers have been rising steadily for several years and that the preceding two years also set new modern records.
Estimates from Virginia are that the yield from public fisheries this season will top out at 300,000. Our neighbor Maryland, with more public fishery areas, expects its harvest to be 600,000 oysters.
Today’s oyster populations are puny in comparison to what they were when English and other European settlers began moving into the bay area four centuries ago.
But the more productive way to look at the figures is that, thank goodness, we have come a long way since the low point of the 1980s. Back then, environmental groups, scientists and others sounded the alarm that the bay was a polluted, disease-ridden mess, choked with oxygen-poor dead zones. Oysters, other fish and shellfish, and sea grasses that provide habitat were dying out.
Today, reports about trying to save the bay often seem discouraging. The cleanup efforts move three steps forward and then slide two or three steps back. When the
Chesapeake Bay Foundation (CBF) issues its State of the Bay report every two years, it chronicles notable progress but also points up how much remains to be done.
In the 2022 report, the overall grade was a disappointing D+.
Since the federal Environmental Protection
Agency established a “pollution diet” for the bay’s watershed area in 2010, there’s been a troubling pattern of setting ambitious goals that aren’t met and must be renegotiated. The latest, in April, was a settlement agreement for two lawsuits, which should result in the EPA getting tougher on Pennsylvania, the watershed state furthest behind in efforts to meet goals for 2025.
Of course, Virginia and Maryland, the other two states contributing most to the bay’s pollution, are also unlikely to meet their goals. Officials voice support for saving the bay but seem unwilling or unable to come up with the necessary hard work and funds.
Then there are frequent reminders that even if we meet the goals, the work must continue as climate change and growth and development bring new threats.
And yet ... we have this good news about the oyster resurgence, and progress on other fronts.
The increasing oyster population is especially significant, and not just because oysters are such a delectable treat and vital to the region’s economy. Oysters are what scientists call a keystone species in the bay, essential to the ecosystem. Oysters filter harmful pollutants from the water, and their reefs provide critical habitat for other shellfish and fish.
The steady resurgence in the bay’s oysters is the result of a great deal of work, innovation and collaboration on several fronts. The Chesapeake Oyster Alliance, formed by the CBF in 2018, brings together environmental and nonprofit groups, colleges and universities, oyster growers and other businesses. United by a belief in the importance of restoring oyster populations, they emphasize science, aquaculture and educating the public.
Oysters are essential but also fragile.
One oyster can produce millions of tiny larvae in a season, but most of them don’t survive. The larvae must attach to a hard, submerged surface to grow, and it takes about three years for an oyster to reach harvesting size. Part of the labor has been restoring old reefs and building new ones, including by recycling oyster shells.
It’s working: The alliance set out to add 10 billion oysters to the bay by 2025. By the fall of 2022, they were almost halfway there.
The efforts of federal, state and local governments are also making a difference, and so are those of environmentalists, scientists, individual volunteers and others who care about oysters and the bay they help protect.
This oyster season’s good news should make all of us more determined to keep up the good fight to save the Chesapeake Bay.