Oyster-Saving Efforts a Wash In Chesapeake

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Oyster Restoration Efforts Prove Challenging, Expensive

The Washington Post's David Fahrenthold describes restoration efforts for the declining oyster population in the Chesapeake Bay.

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"The big engine," Paynter said.

Around most of the bay, the engine has stopped running.

"You're talking about sort of a lunar landscape here," Paynter said. He was looking at video of a neighboring area, buried in silt and only lightly seeded with oysters. After heavy harvests and diseases and dirt washing off farm fields and suburban lawns, this is what's left of many reefs.

For decades, governments have tried in vain to change this picture. Since 1994, federal and state officials together have spent about $19 million in Virginia and $39.7 million in Maryland on oyster projects.

But at last count, oyster numbers appeared to have declined since 1994. One EPA estimate found they had fallen about 20 percent, although some officials say that's too pessimistic. And watermen have left the oystering business as harvests have declined. More than 2,000 of them harvested oysters in Maryland in the 1980s. The average number of watermen from 2002 to 2006 was about 530.

"We must accept the fact that efforts to date to restore native oyster populations have failed," a pair of researchers from the Virginia Institute of Marine Science and Rutgers University wrote in a report last year. "The prognosis . . . is continued failure."

Scientists and activists point to two significant missteps. One of them, they say, was growing millions of oysters specifically so watermen could catch them.

In Maryland, for example, state officials paid to create new oyster habitats in the bay by piling up old oyster shells so larvae would have a place to attach. Once they did, the state uprooted them and moved them to sections of the bay where oyster diseases are less virulent. Then watermen took some of them.

This program, paid for mostly with taxpayer funds, supplies at least 70 percent of all the oysters that watermen catch in the state.

But outside researchers say it does little to help the oyster population. The bivalves that survive dirt and disease -- the ones most likely to produce their own baby oysters -- often wind up in stuffing.

"We're at 1 percent or less [of the oyster's historic population]. That's collapsed. We're still fishing. It's kind of like if we were still whaling on the East Coast," said David Schulte, an oyster expert with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. "I mean, the population may never recover. It may not recover now anyway."

In the past, state officials have responded that disease would probably kill these oysters, so it was better that watermen benefit. Virginia officials still say so. Maryland officials say they have begun to question this view, although they have continued the work on a smaller scale.