THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Tuesday, March 19, 1996 TAG: 9603190002
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A14 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Editorial
LENGTH: Medium: 61 lines
Don't expect a robust rebound of oystering in Chesapeake Bay and its tributaries in the lifetime of anyone reading this commentary. Harvests exceeding a million bushels haven't been seen since the early 1980s. Virginia watermen tonged up about 55,000 bushels of crassostrea Virginicas in the 1994-season. The take to date in the 1995-96 season is about 15,000 bushels.
What's done in the oysters: MSX and Dermo diseases lethal to oysters in warm and saltier-than-usual waters. Overharvesting of oysters by watermen. Pollution from farm, town and city.
Successive dryer-than-normal years and warmer-than-normal winters have raised the temperature and salinity of the Bay to levels hospitable to MSX and Dermo and thus inhospitable to oysters.
Watermen have tonged just about all of the large oysters from the Bay - oysters whose survival suggests they are resistant to MSX or Dermo or both and might produce disease-resistant offspring if left alone. (The watermen contend that the few big oysters left would succumb eventually to disease, so the state has permitted the oysters to be harvested, losing any chance of learning whether they are disease resistant.)
The destruction of wetlands, which filter rainwater, to build parking lots, roads, shopping centers, houses and other structures has ``hardened'' the shoreline, increasing the volumes of man-made toxins flowing into the Bay.
So oysters brought to Virginia's tables and seafood fests likely have been snatched from the Gulf of Mexico. Others come from Long Island Sound, where MSX is a menace. Here and there in Virginia's waters are pockets in which oysters do well, at least for a time.
The state still tries to boost oyster production, with dismal results. The Virginia Institute of Marine Science is conducting careful experiments with oysters from Pacific Coast and Asian waters in search of disease-resistant specimens. Maybe the pursuit will pay off; maybe not. If there is a payoff, it won't be soon.
The oyster-management arm of the Virginia Marine Resources Commission has been building oyster-shell reefs in estuaries - notably, the Rappahannock and Great Wicomico - in the hope that oysters planted on the reefs will prosper. But this season the state didn't restock other tidal waters with seed oysters from the James River (where they abound); MSX and Dermo kill nearly all of the replanted seed oysters before they are 3 inches long, big enough to legally take. Watermen didn't restock the rivers with seed oysters either - it's futile.
Bringing back the oysters looks to be mission impossible or close to it. Not only are the oysters disappearing, so are Bay oystermen. Satirist Walt Kelly's comic-strip creature Pogo had it right: We have met the enemy, and he is us.
Needless to say, the state should persist in trying to bring oysters back to the Bay, not just for the seafood industry's welfare, but for our own. The fate of the Bay's seafood bounty is linked to our own. The oyster's near demise and the long decline in the crab population teach that by recklessly exploiting and trashing the environment, humankind trashes itself too. by CNB