There may be few regions in the U.S. that check their environmental pulse as often as the Chesapeake Bay. Awash in federal and state investment, boosted by NGO’s of all stripes and celebrated by the estimated nine million people who live near its shores, the Chesapeake Bay is under constant study.
And why not. The latest Chesapeake Bay Foundation (CBF) report finds the most recent annual Bay production of seafood reached about 500 million pounds, with the seafood industry alone generating over $1 billion in sales in Maryland and Virginia.
The star of the CBF study is the lowly but mighty oyster, which on its own, in the states of Maryland and Virginia, delivered close to $57 million in revenue in 2022. The bigger direct income earner is the blue crab. But only oysters can uniquely serve the Bay through their natural reef architecture, bracing shorelines from wave energy, and sheltering small aquatic life including crabs and juvenile fish of more than 300 species, like American eel, Atlantic croaker, Bluefish, striped bass, and Atlantic menhaden.
The Chesapeake Bay is a 64,000-square-mile watershed that extends across parts of Delaware, Maryland, New York, Pennsylvania, Virginia, West Virginia, and the District of Columbia. In 2014, these states partnered in a ten-year program to lift biodiversity and essential aquatic survivability of the Bay. The latest CBF report looks to how the next ten years might be strategized, especially considering the impact of changing weather patterns.
The study is entitled “Hope on the Half Shell” and shows the oyster in improving standing in the Bay. Oyster harvests are up, oyster seeding of targeted areas of the Bay is strong, and through the filtration powers of these heroic bivalves, water quality is visibly improved by some accounts. It’s undeniably progressed since the challenges of 2019 when I produced the documentary “Crisis on the Half Shell: The Chesapeake Bay.”
Over this period of time, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has been a partner and key coordinator of the Chesapeake Bay Program which set a goal of restoring oysters to ten Chesapeake tributaries by 2025 and ensuring their protection beyond that. So far, more than 1400 acres of reefs have been restored, with an area of 400 acres left to go. In total, that’s more than two square miles, or 1,055 football fields of reefs. It’s considered the world’s largest shellfish restoration project; price tag so far: $90 million.
Stephanie Westby of NOAA has been at the helm of the federal government’s NOAA Restoration Center. She says that while the gains are significant, conditions for oysters in the Chesapeake Bay remain degraded. The remedial work of man to give oysters a new lease on life is very heavy lifting, assuring that water beds are adequately prepped with shell or rock for new and developing oyster colonies, and then seeded and followed for six years. And beyond that, says Westby, “oysters are easy, people are hard.” The environment struggles with effluence from ground sources and pollution in general that pours into the Bay. “We’ve got the oysters working really hard.”
Across the nation, in the United Kingdom and Europe, in parts of the Middle East, Asia, and Australia, alliances, coalitions, businesses and agencies of all kinds are dropping breeding oysters and baby oysters or “spat” into bodies of water, some with announced targets of millions or even billions of oysters. The Chesapeake Oyster Alliance, a coalition of over 100 partners, including businesses, oyster farmers, nonprofit organizations and others, has established a target of adding ten billion oysters to the Bay by 2025. “As of 2024, or late 2023,” reports Allison Colden, CBF-Maryland Executive Director, “the Oyster Alliance has added 5.9 billion oysters to the Bay. So we’ve exceeded the halfway mark of our goal.” The state of Virginia’s Marine Resources Commission this year reported a 32% increase in total oyster harvest, when compared to the 2021-2022 season. Public grounds yield over 300,000 bushels and private grounds, more than 400,000. Take together that was Virginia’s highest record harvest in 35 years.
So that’s the good news. The not so great news is that all of these figures add up to nowhere near the historical high levels of oyster population once seen in the Chesapeake Bay, the name “Chesapeake” derived from the Algonquin for “great shellfish bay.” Seventeenth century English Captain John Smith and his exploration party famously recorded, hundreds of years ago, that the oysters there lay “thick as stones.”
But the Bay is a long way off from that kind of abundance and, roaring right up alongside the latest big restoration numbers is the climate change onslaught you could call “big weather.”
Marine scientists and advocates agree that most of the highs and most of the lows of aquatic health in the Chesapeake have a lot to do with weather patterns or, in global shorthand, “climate.” The latest CBF report delves into the unabating difficulties of climate change confronting the roughly 4,500 miles of surface area that constitutes the Chesapeake Bay. “Sea-level rise in the Chesapeake Bay region is occurring at one of the fastest rates in the nation, threatening nearly 250,000 acres of tidal wetlands and more than 110,500 homes, worth $34 billion, by 2100,” the study states. “Floods at high tide, so-called “sunny-day floods,” are expected to increase as much as seven-fold by mid-century in places like Annapolis, Maryland and Norfolk, Virginia.”
Record downpours reduce water salinity and, as a consequence, oyster reproduction. Extended stretches of hot dry days can have the opposite effect. While this year’s boom in spat production is one for the books and harvests have been strong, Don Boesch, president emeritus of the University of Maryland Environmental Center, is reserved. “Although we’re celebrating the uptick in wild harvest in Maryland, and also this tremendous spat set that we had this year, it’s important to recognize that a drought is not success,” he cautions. “We’ve had these dry conditions which increase salinity, which increases the habitat and survival of oysters. That’s not going to last forever. So we need to manage the resource to deal with the low points in their dynamics, as well as the high point.”
The University of Maryland’s Horn Point Laboratory in Cambridge, Maryland, is at the forefront of oyster population restoration efforts. In 2023, the hatchery there produced 1.76 billion spat, a figure close to previous record-setting years. It’s one of the largest oyster hatcheries on the East Coast. Stephanie Tobash Alexander is manager. “2023 was an amazing season,” she says. “Everything went well. It’s like surfing a wave. We caught a really good wave at the beginning of 2023 and it continued through the season.” Of that total, over a billion went to restoration efforts, mainly in Maryland, but some in Virginia. The remaining 700 million went to “the fishery:” that is public and private growers, some counties, some aquaculture, some people working bottom leases attached to their land, and some working “off-bottom” aquaculture in tanks, which Alexander says is the new wave and very work-intensive. Oyster larvae and seed is sold by the hatchery and sent, under permits, to many locations outside of the Maryland Eastern Shore laboratory, some to Virginia, New Jersey, North Carolina and beyond.
Last year’s bounty approached the hatchery’s record levels of close to two billion in 2016 and again in 2017. But every year is different and the Horn Point Lab won’t soon forget 2019, a year of heavy rain and consequently diluted Bay water salinity. All they could eek out of the process was 200 million spat on shell. It was, Alexander said, “pretty upsetting – depressing” and proved human intervention can only go so far when dealing with “Mother Nature.”
This year, she says, seems okay. “We’ve got brood stock in the hatchery and we’re ready to go; we’re spawning by the end of March.” There has been more rain over the Chesapeake Bay than in 2023, however and there are concerns about possible salinity dilution. At the same time, the fresh precipitation has the capacity to flush out food in the water which sustains oysters now growing in the Bay. “We always try to make the best out of what we’ve been given,” she says.
Those who guard the Chesapeake Bay through their restoration efforts and those who work the Bay are convinced that, as bad as it was, the Covid pandemic period gave a boost to the Bay. Oysters that could not be sold stayed in the water, as food establishments that previously bought them from watermen were closed, and there were no customers to buy them. Every adult oyster has the capacity to filter up to 50 gallons of water per day. And that’s what those unharvested oysters did over all those months.
Of course, it was nothing like centuries past when oyster reefs were so abundant that ships had to navigate around them. Even into the late nineteenth century, oysters could filter the entire Chesapeake Bay water column in less than a week.
Waterman Don Novak of Solomons Island, Maryland says that “during Covid, there was an eerie silence. You couldn’t go on your own boat. That went on for a year. I think there was tremendous regeneration of the water quality over that period.” Novak goes to the water for his living. It is alternately a source of joy and meaning, frustration and hope. Like most watermen, he’s no fan of regulation but he can see that environmentalists have made a difference. And that’s all he’ll say about it. “They’ve got our interests at heart. They really do. Do I necessarily agree with everything that they’re talking about? Not even close. If you go down that rabbit hole, you ain’t even gonna be able to tie your shoes anywhere near the water!”
It’s easy to say that nothing is as good as it was before the pandemic, and there’s plenty of evidence that, in general, individuals and society are still putting the pieces together after Covid. But, if you could bring yourself to look to nature as a beacon, you might find yourself feeling oddly hopeful. Casting a glance at the Chesapeake Bay one warm afternoon, Novak mused “I’ve had friends come down to the Patuxent River and just be awe-stricken by the quality of the water. I was upstairs the other day. Just looked out the window, and the water looked like a swimming pool. Just clear as crystal. Everything looked good.”
