THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Thursday, October 24, 1996 TAG: 9610240352
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY SCOTT HARPER, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: 68 lines
In an unusual bid to save what scientists believe are some of the last disease-resistant oysters in Virginia waters, the Chesapeake Bay Foundation offered Wednesday to buy the oysters and return them to their natural habitat.
The state responded to the offer by revealing that it, too, is preparing a buyout program, according to a spokesman for the Virginia Marine Resources Commission - the same agency that voted to allow a harvest of these special oysters beginning Dec. 1.
Like the well-known environmental foundation, the VMRC would buy large, adult oysters from watermen who collect them from Tangier and Pocomoke sounds, two inlets of the Bay near the Maryland border, said agency spokesman Wilford Kale.
The oysters, expected to cost no more than $45,000, would then be transplanted onto a manmade oyster reef at the mouth of the Great Wicomico River, where scientists have noted some reproductive success among the beleaguered species, Kale said.
The Bay's oyster population, especially in Virginia, has nearly disappeared under a lethal barrage of disease and pollution. Recent harvests are 1 percent of their historical bounty, once thought to be limitless.
The two offers to buy as many as 2,500 bushels of oysters come after the VMRC voted last month to open Tangier and Pocomoke sounds to a limited harvest over the objections of staff experts and marine scientists.
The 5-4 vote, which ended a three-year ban on taking oysters from the sounds, brought criticism from scientists, environmentalists and state politicians, led by several Virginia Beach Republicans, all of whom urged the VMRC to reconsider their decision.
Commission chairman William Pruitt has said he does not favor reconsideration. Pruitt cast the deciding vote to allow a harvest this winter.
But Kale said Wednesday that Pruitt, who was attending a fisheries conference in Massachusetts, is generally supportive of a buyout program.
The VMRC will decide whether to initiate such a program at a meeting next week in Newport News. If the commission votes not to start the program, the Bay foundation is prepared to move ahead with its preservation plan, said Joseph H. Maroon, CBF's executive director in Virginia.
``CBF is willing to make this extraordinary investment because we strongly believe it will have some lasting biological benefit,'' Maroon said.
Scientists believe that adult oysters in the two sounds somehow have developed a resistance to two devastating diseases in the Bay, MSX and Dermo, and that the only chance for a stock recovery is to leave the resistant oysters alone.
Gene Burreson, an oyster researcher at the Virginia Institute of Marine Science, has said that scientists at Rutgers in New Jersey have proven that oysters can gain a natural resistance to the diseases.
Noting that MSX and Dermo have been remarkably powerful this past year, Burreson has said the only plausible explanation that oysters were able to survive in the two sounds is that they have started to adapt to the diseases.
Burreson lost his bid to keep the two sounds closed, partially because of arguments from watermen that the oysters might die anyway, and that it would make sense to let struggling fishermen make a little money this winter.
Kale said the idea for a state buyout program originated from Jim Wesson, the state's chief of oyster replenishment.
Wesson raised the idea at a staff meeting last week, and said the money would come from a rainy-day fund within his office at VMRC, according to Kale.
Simply paying watermen not to catch oysters was not an option, officials said, because dividing the money among licensed fishermen would pose an administrative hornets' nest. ILLUSTRATION: [Color Photo]
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KEYWORDS: CHESAPEAKE BAY OYSTERS VMRC by CNB