Small Environmental Successes Stir Hope for Chesapeake Bay

By Elizabeth Williamson
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, June 8, 2006

When the water warms up into the 50s and the cormorants wheel overhead, Mike Bailey takes out his boat and catches a scent that hints of a time once familiar to every Potomac angler: the smell of a river teeming with running shad.

"It's not a fishy smell -- sort of a salt air to it," said Bailey, who lives in Darnestown. "They arrive in such mass, the river fills with spawning fish [and] all of these birds that have come in greater numbers to feed on these fish each spring. We see bald eagles just about every day."

On land, spring is a season of bad news and dire forecasts about the health of the Chesapeake Bay and its tributaries. With species depletion and oxygen shortages, algae blooms and temperature problems, there's plenty to mourn in a storied estuary failed by human carelessness.

But on the water itself, spring brings a quite different message. Amid spawning fish and molting crabs, patches of lush grass and windows of clear water, comes a whispered promise: The Chesapeake Bay, historically abundant, will rebound, if people help.

Examples of that hoped-for rebirth remain isolated. Many would call them mere happy accidents on an otherwise grim scene. But they're reminders, said John Page Williams of the Chesapeake Bay Foundation, "that this is what we'd get if we work hard."

Grasses on the Grow

Williams, senior naturalist for the Chesapeake Bay Foundation, eased his boat near shore in the Severn River's Round Bay section off Annapolis. Just beneath the surface, widgeon and redhead grass swayed like ghostly hair in the green water.

"This is the epicenter of the grass," he said. Glancing at the pier stretching alongside, he said: "By August, this'll be un-fishable. Which is pretty cool."

In the 1980s and early 1990s, runoff and sediments from construction along the Severn River waterfront contributed to a die-off that all but obliterated the Severn's underwater grasses, said Williams, who lives on the river. Then came new rules and a slowdown in building that "gave the river time to catch its breath," he said.

Over the past several years, the midsection of the Severn has seen the virtual rebirth of a half-dozen types of underwater vegetation. The grasses provide food for waterfowl and, perhaps more important, offer cool shelter and habitat for fish.

"I watched it die, and now I'm thinking, oh God, how lucky to see it come back," Williams said. "Biodiversity brings stability, and biodiversity in the Severn means a lot."

More Crabs, for Now

The bay's warm-weather crabbing season comes in three runs: early spring, early summer and fall. This year in the lower bay, crabs were so abundant by April that those three runs now promise to blend into one long, continuous boom, said Jeff Crockett, president of the Tangier Island Watermen's Association.

"We were seeing like we saw in the '80s and '90s," Crockett said of the spring run. "The male crabs we've been catching this year are the biggest and the prettiest I've ever seen. And they taste awesome."

Crockett, who calls himself "the ultimate optimist," says the boom is part of a long population surge. But Jack Travelstead, chief of fisheries management at the Virginia Marine Resources Commission, is less sure.

"It's probably something to do with weather patterns, just a small trickle of crabs that reached the right size at the right time," he said. "I don't think it's a signal that the population is orders of magnitude larger than what we've seen."

The most reliable count of the bay's crab population is the winter dredge survey, which this year indicated that while the count is up from the 16-year-old survey's lowest levels, recorded in the early 1990s and 2000, it was slightly below last year's.

"My belief right now is that the surge this spring was short-lived," said Rom Lipcius, professor of marine science at the Virginia Institute of Marine Science in Gloucester Point, Va. Lipcius hypothesized that the crab boom originated with warmer weather last year that caused the creatures to grow faster and enter the fishery in greater numbers.

But the same temperature surge decimated large swaths of eelgrass, a favored nursery habitat for crabs. The warm water caused entire beds of eelgrass to defoliate, and they have yet to recover. Another temperature surge this year could damage them beyond repair.

"The eelgrass impact could be felt late this year or early next," Lipcius said. He isn't sure that will happen, but it makes the crab glut "a story where there's good and bad."

Shad on the Rebound

Each spring for more than a decade, Jim Cummins, director of living resources at the Interstate Commission on the Potomac River Basin, waits in the moonlight for the shad to return home to the Potomac from the Atlantic Ocean to spawn. He catches them, mixes eggs with milt, or sperm, in a big commercial mixing bowl, then transports the fertilized eggs to a Virginia hatchery. After about a month, he releases the fry into the Potomac. A memory of the river is imprinted on them as they swim for the Atlantic, ensuring that in about five years, the cycle will begin anew.

"They were once the most abundant and commercially important, and I argue they were once the most ecologically important, species in the bay," Cummins said. The shad is a "clockspring" species, he says, a fish that from egg to adult supports the entire ecosystem including, at one time, man.

Silvery, plentiful and nutritious, the Potomac's American shad were so important to the colonial economy that they've been dubbed the Founding Fish. Washington's first traffic jams, Cummins has read, were caused by wagon loads of the herring-type fish being rushed to markets as far away as Ohio.

But by the 1980s, shad were so severely overfished that a whole generation grew up never having tasted one. A two-decade moratorium was imposed, and biologists labored to restore the species throughout the watershed.

Today, the Potomac River's American shad population is about eight times the high counts recorded in the 1950s. Potomac eggs supply restoration programs from the Susquehanna to the Rappahannock.

Success would not have been possible, Cummins said, without improved sewage treatment, grass restoration and the moratorium.

Fishing the Potomac near Mount Vernon after dark, Cummins thinks of George Washington's day, when the river ran silver with fish streaking back home to deliver another generation. "The moon would shine on them," he said.

"These are things we've forgotten. But it's ready to spring back, and soon there will be more shad than anybody who's alive has seen."