To Save Oysters, a Culture May Have to Die
Panel Suggests Drastically Limiting Watermen's Harvests, Shifting to Shellfish 'Farms'

By David A. Fahrenthold
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, January 16, 2008

The traditional life of a Maryland oysterman -- roaming the Chesapeake Bay for any bivalve he can scrape up -- might have to vanish if the bay's oysters are to recover from a historic collapse, according to a new proposal from a state advisory commission.

The commission proposes ending oyster harvests across large stretches of the Chesapeake and perhaps shifting the state's oyster industry away from free-ranging watermen and toward privately run shellfish "farms."

In an interim report to be released today, the commission says that this kind of radical change might be the only way to bring back a species that has fallen to 1 percent of its historical levels.

"You probably would not want watermen going where they wanted to and capturing whatever wild oysters they can find," in the future, said William Eichbaum, an environmental activist who chairs the Maryland Oyster Advisory Commission, which is issuing the report.

The commission was established by the state government in April, charged with finding a way out of one of the Chesapeake's most frustrating ecological and financial quagmires.

Almost $40 million in federal and state funds has been spent on oyster "restoration," a good deal of it on programs that grew the shellfish just so watermen could catch them, but nothing has worked. The state restricts a waterman's total daily catch and places a minimum on the size of oysters that can be taken.

The Chesapeake's oysters, once so bountiful that towns were built on their discarded shells, have been ravaged by overfishing and disease. Harvests have fallen from an average of 2.5 million bushels a year in Maryland in about 1920 to about 104,000. The state's oystermen have dwindled as well, from more than 2,000 in the 1980s to about 529.

To fix the problem, the commission proposed ending "put-and-take" programs, where the government grows oysters and then puts them in the water for watermen to harvest. Instead, it proposed making large portions of Maryland's underwater oyster beds off-limits for harvesting.

Many of the remaining areas could be leased to private owners, either to farm oysters or simply to harvest the wild shellfish growing there. Virginia, the other Chesapeake Bay state, leases 95,000 acres of underwater habitat.

If oysters rebound, commission members said, they could help filter bay water as they feed and provide a habitat for other creatures in their jagged clusters.

"It's part of bay restoration," said Eichbaum, a vice president at the World Wildlife Fund. "You need to get this population back."

But the head of the Maryland Watermen's Association said yesterday that oystermen could suffer greatly under this plan. Larry Simns said that watermen have traditionally depended on oyster harvests for wintertime income and that some still do, even with oyster harvests so low.

"If somebody took four months of your livelihood . . . how much impact would that have on you?" Simns asked yesterday. "We can't afford to be out there just crabbing in the summer because it doesn't keep us year-round."

The commission's ideas are far from becoming law: Members said they want to probe the issue further before issuing final recommendations this year. The governor or General Assembly probably would have to sign off on major policy changes.

Another question mark: Government scientists are studying the possibility of introducing an Asian oyster species into the Chesapeake. A draft of that long-awaited study is expected in the spring.

Some of the commission's ideas are in practice at the 15-year-old Circle C Oyster Ranch at the farthest tip of St. Mary's County. There, hundreds of thousands of oysters are being grown in mesh bags suspended near the surface of St. Jerome Creek.

The oysters grow large and healthy, ranch manager Frank Taylor said yesterday. If enough people started raising shellfish in the same way, he said, "we could bring the oyster back."