Seeking Common Ground on Bay Oysters

Virginia is ready to transplant an Asian oyster species to shellfish farms around the Chesapeake Bay. Maryland is opposed, saying it might harm the ailing native oyster.

The swing vote in one of the most important decisions in the recent history of the bay finally weighed in yesterday, after five years of study and months of hard thinking, but not much was settled.

Col. Dionysios Anninos, the head of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers' Norfolk District, tried to split the difference. In a memo obtained by The Washington Post, Anninos proposed a plan that focused mostly on bringing back the Chesapeake's native oysters. But his plan did not rule out using the Asian variety in the future and would allow oyster farmers to continue testing them in the bay.

Now, Anninos said, he wants to spent the next 10 days on what looks like an impossible task: persuading the two states to agree on a single answer to the Chesapeake's years-old dilemma.

"The good news is, everybody's still focused to come forward with a single and common" decision, Anninos said in a telephone interview. "But they're not there yet."

The idea that the Chesapeake -- whose oysters once filled stews and seafood platters across the country -- might be saved by a foreign oyster is an odd one. But the bay's native bivalves have been savaged by over-fishing, pollution and shellfish disease, and their population is about 1 percent of its historic highs.

So for years, watermen and shellfish processors have called for the introduction of Crassostrea ariakensis, an oyster native to China. "This oyster grows twice as fast. It survives better than the native oyster" when diseases strike, said A.J. Erskine, president of the Virginia Seafood Council, which has 1 million Asian oysters living in test sites in the region. "I don't know that there's a downside, to be honest."

But scientists and environmentalists say the Asian species might crowd out the native one or hamper its reproduction. The federal government embarked on a massive scientific study, which took 15 years and cost $15 million, in hopes of settling the question.

It didn't.

In his memo, Anninos wrote that the Corps of Engineers' research could not determine how likely it was that the oysters used in shellfish farms -- which are specially produced to be less fertile -- might manage to reproduce anyway and let baby Asian oysters loose in the open bay.

So Anninos said he would allow experiments with the Asian oyster to continue, with 1 million to 1.5 million oysters permitted among farms. He wrote that a "supplemental" environmental impact statement would be completed with the results of the continued testing.

"As the uncertainty questions are answered, this may result in disbanding this strategy completely or expanding it," he wrote.

Yesterday, that idea was criticized by the nonprofit Chesapeake Bay Foundation, which said that eventually the Asian oyster would escape into the wild. "The science is pretty strong on that," the foundation's Bill Goldsborough said.

Federal agencies including the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the Environmental Protection Agency, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration have also criticized the idea of allowing Asian oysters into the bay, even in farms. "Even though the risks are small, they're enough that we don't think it's appropriate," Peyton Robertson, director of the NOAA Chesapeake Bay office, said yesterday after hearing of Anninos's decision.

Anninos said yesterday that he hopes that all parties can reach a common decision by the end of the month. But if they can't agree, it is possible that there could be a split decision, with a state on either side.

"Our option does not include utilizing a nonnative oyster for any purpose. . . . I feel like that we are firm on that," said Frank W. Dawson III, an assistant secretary of natural resources in Maryland. "It's not always possible to come to consensus," he added.

Yesterday afternoon at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History, filmmaker Michael Fincham screened a documentary called "Who Killed Crassostrea Virginica: The Fall and Rise of the Chesapeake Oyster." The film notes that, decades ago, efforts to bring another Asian oyster to the Chesapeake might have introduced one of the diseases that has plagued the native one.

"The search for a better oyster from somewhere else is a dream that doesn't die," said Fincham, whose film was shown as part of the Environmental Film Festival in the Nation's Capital.