Signs of Life

An experiment allows oysters to make a comeback in part of the Chesapeake Bay watershed.

WE INTERRUPT our usual (and justified) complaints about the sorry state of the Chesapeake Bay and its watershed to trumpet some good news. A five-year-old experiment 80 miles south of Washington has yielded an explosion of oyster life. Don't leap for the oyster forks, though. Replicating this success would be prohibitively expensive. And the danger that the thriving colony will be decimated by disease is ever-present. Still, there's reason to celebrate.

In 2004, researchers closed the Great Wicomico River in Virginia to oyster harvesting and planted two types of reefs made of old oyster shells over 87 acres. One was set a few inches over the river bottom, another piled one to two feet high. The taller reef gave baby oysters a place to latch onto that wasn't mired in the polluted muck on the bottom. This allowed the water-filtering bivalves to thrive. When researchers checked in on the oysters in 2007, they found an estimated 185 million of them. That's up to 1,000 oysters per square meter. Not only that, they also found an ecosystem humming around it.

That we find these results amazing just shows how bad things have gotten for the Chesapeake Bay and its 64,000-square-mile watershed. Because of centuries of overfishing and more recent pollution and disease, the oyster population is less than 1 percent of what it once was. The federal government has been trying to clean up the fabled waterway ever since President Reagan mentioned it in his 1984 State of the Union address. The Chesapeake Bay Program of the Environmental Protection Agency has spent about $6 billion since then trying to restore its namesake's luster, to no avail. President Obama issued an executive order in May establishing the Federal Leadership Committee to better coordinate federal and state programs to save the bay. A draft of an overall strategy is due in the fall.

It would be great if the folks working on that committee could think about replicating the Great Wicomico River experiment throughout the watershed. But the price tag is out of reach. According to the Maryland Department of Natural Resources, the total cost for placing two feet of oyster shells on one acre of reef is estimated between $80,000 and $100,000. The agency says that 2,600 acres of oyster habitat are lost annually. For new reefs to offset these losses, up to $260 million and 156 million bushels of oyster shells would be required. Still, there may be lessons, and glimmers of hope, in healthy oysters resisting the tides of history.