By Sandra Olivetti Martin
There are many fish in the sea, my grandmother said, though her fish were metaphors for chances at love. In our Bay, there are many real oysters, despite the widely acknowledged plunge of their population to one percent of their historic abundance. Also numerous are the ways our Chesapeake oyster states, both Maryland and Virginia, seek to promote the species’ renewal.
One of those ways you’ll read about in this week’s paper, in Bob Melamud’s story Science on the Bay: Allison Colden Tweaked Reef Balls to Help Break up Dead Zones. Colden’s experiment dropped concrete reef balls into the river in hopes of mixing up an oxygen-rich cocktail throughout the water column.
To find out how the nine-month-long experiment worked, you’ll have to read Bob’s story.
Then, if you’re ready for the bigger picture, you might read Maryland Department of Natural Resources’ Oyster Management report. That 500-page document will be up for revision in 2021 as “the department has committed to reviewing the effectiveness of the locations of sanctuaries, public shellfish fishery areas, and aquaculture areas every five years and to propose changes where needed.”
Those three key phrases — sanctuaries, public shellfish fishery areas and aquaculture areas — define the geography of Maryland’s modern approach to oyster restoration. Modern, in this sense, dates to 2010, when our state committed to an all-our effort to save the precious ecological resource while maintaining an oyster economy.
Sanctuaries were planned as our native oyster’s salvation. In sanctuaries throughout the Bay — including the Severn River, where Bob’s story is set — oysters would be encouraged to live a natural lifespan. Safe from harvest they would, the hope was, reproduce to make more oysters, overcome the previously devastating treats of disease and “provide essential natural ecological functions that cannot be obtained on a harvest bar.”
Two factors governed where sanctuaries would be located. First, for study’s sake, they’d be divided among salinity zones, though oysters prefer higher salinity. Second, they’d be located to “protect half of the Bay’s most productive oyster grounds that remain.” Remain is a key word there. About a quarter of a million acres were historically productive oyster grounds. In 2010, when this modern era began, that quality acreage was down to 36,000.
Encouraging oysters to live in Maryland’s 51 sanctuaries spanning 253,411 bottom acres is an easy phrase encompassing a lot of hard work. Carrying out Bay Weekly’s commitment to covering oyster restoration, Bob Melamud has reported on those phases, including the deep-sixing into the Harris Creek Sanctuary of fossil oyster shell imported from Florida. Costly though such actions are, there are good reasons for them. Over decades, researchers have concluded that oysters like no bed better than one made from their own shells. That simple truth is why Maryland’s Oyster Recovery Partnership is now invested in recovering and reusing shucked oyster shells that once would have been tossed away.
