In the year 2000, Maryland and the other Chesapeake Bay region states set a goal of increasing the number of oysters in the bay by 10 fold by 2010. But despite taxpayer-funded projects to plant millions of young oysters, the number of oysters in the bay actually fell by half over that decade, plummeting to just a third of one percent of historic levels in the northern bay. The continued decline of the bay’s keystone species was in part because of disease, and in part because watermen continued to harvest oysters at rates far beyond what was sustainable.
Since 2010, oyster populations in the bay have begun to creep upward again. Good weather conditions have helped reproduction. And in 2010 Governor Martin O’Malley’s administration created sanctuaries to protect 24 percent of the bay’s remaining oyster reefs.
This fragile progress may be threatened, however, by a new push by watermen under Governor Larry Hogan’s Administration to open up these no-harvesting sanctuaries and expand power dredging for oysters in the bay.
“These oyster sanctuaries as we got them now, I don’t see how they are benefitting anyone,” said Robert T. Brown, president of the Maryland Watermen’s Association.
Brown is lobbying the Hogan Administration to replace some of the state’s new oyster sanctuaries with “rotational harvest areas” that allow watermen to come in after three or four years and dredge or scoop out the oysters so they can sell them.
“The attitude has already changed in Annapolis. Hogan is a businessman,” Brown said. “And Maryland is a big business, and the seafood business is a big business, and you’ve got to run it like a business.”
An issue of debate is power dredging. Power dredging is a method of scraping oysters from the bay’s bottom with a metal rake-like device and bag dragged behind a motorized work boat. It was invented just after the Civil War, but banned by the state for more than a century because it removes too many oysters too fast and rips up oyster reefs.
The state slowly began to legalize power dredging in certain parts of the bay in the early 1980s, then expanded power-dredging zones in 1999, 2003, and 2013. Over the last five years, as oyster populations have multiplied, the number of watermen buying licenses from the state and reporting power dredging has skyrocketed -- rising from 418 in 2010 to 723 this year, according to the Maryland Department of Natural Resources. Watermen this past winter caught 178,000 bushels of oysters worth $7.8 million using power dredges. That was almost half of the total harvest, with the rest caught with metal scoop-like devices lowered from boats (called patent tongs and hand tongs), or by divers.
Watermen claim – without scientific support -- that power dredging is actually good for oysters and the bay.
“The science doesn’t say that,” said David Goshorn, Assistant Secretary for Aquatic Resources at the Maryland Department of Natural Resources.
Goshorn said his agency is considering the watermen’s proposal to open up the sanctuaries to possible “rotational harvest,” because it could help the oyster harvesting industry. But he said the problem with power dredging is that it breaks up and destroys reefs that are important breeding grounds not only for oysters, but also crabs and fish.
“Power dredging does two things, for sure. One is, it flattens the reefs, when we need the opposite. We need three-dimensional reefs,” Goshorn said. “And (dredging) also re-suspends some of the sediment… and re-suspending the sediment and the nutrients associated with it can be bad for the bay. So from an oyster restoration perspective, power dredging is not the answer. I know some people disagree with that, but that’s what the science is telling us.”
Denise Breitburg, a senior scientist at the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center, said: “Limiting the fishery removal of oysters is going to be really important for oyster restoration in the bay, if that’s really the goal. The population cannot withstand the level of mortality that it historically experienced due to fishing.”
Michael Wilberg, an associate professor at the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science, suggested a temporary ban on harvesting would help the oysters, although not the oystermen. “A moratorium would be the fastest way to increase the oyster population,” Wilberg said. “However our management of fisheries is a lot more complicated, and that’s not our only goal. We also want to see a sustainable harvest, and sustainable communities (of watermen). And when you start adding those other factors into the mix, simply adopting a moratorium compromises those other objectives.”
With oyster populations in the bay still at less than one percent of historic levels, it makes sense for Maryland to not only keep its new oyster sanctuaries in place, but also ban power dredging everywhere in the Chesapeake. Watermen are already increasingly shifting to oyster farming and aquaculture, and such a ban would accelerate a move in the right direction.
