Chesapeake Bay Blue Crab Stocks Down 70% Since 1990 - Oysters At 1% Of Historic Levels

[hatrack]

EDIT

The bay's blue crab stock is down 70 percent since 1990 due to overfishing and water pollution, according to Virginia and Maryland fisheries managers. The states have imposed steep cuts on this year's female crab harvest, aiming to reduce the number of crabs taken by more than a third.

For Kellam and his neighbors in southern Maryland, where the working rigs and crab picking houses that sustained these communities for generations have been replaced by yachts and vacation homes, hopes are dim that the blue crabs will ever come back. "It's looking worse every year," says Bob McKay, who at 74 is the oldest working waterman in St. Mary's County. He still sells crabs out of a shed in his yard but doubts the industry will live much longer than he does. "I don't know what the solution could be."

Watermen have turned to real estate and automobile repair. They've opened seafood restaurants and bakeries. The best way to make money on the Chesapeake these days is taking businessmen from Washington and Philadelphia on charter fishing trips. Those who still rely on crabbing are further hurt by a double punch of higher fuel costs and an economic downturn that's meant fewer consumers dropping up to $200 on a bushel of crabs. "People don't have the disposable income. They're just not buying," says Kellam, who spends up to $150 a day on diesel, which costs about $5 a gallon at a nearby marina.

There was a time when Chesapeake watermen made their living off the winter oyster harvest, using hand tongs and later power dredges to supply most of the world's oysters. But disease and over-harvesting nearly wiped out Chesapeake oysters in the 1980s, and despite millions invested in restoration, they've never recovered. Scientists estimate the Chesapeake now contains about 1 percent of the oysters it once did.

EDIT

http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/B/BLUE_CRAB_BLUES?SITE=MOSTP&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT

[phantom power]

1. grim

[depakid]

2. Thomas Courtney gets it:

Thomas Courtney, who sells Kellam the alewife fish he uses for bait, laughs when asked whether state efforts to revive blue crabs will bring them back.

"It ain't what we're pulling out of the water. It's what we're putting in the water," says Courtney, 62. "You've got a cornfield, 20 acres, you put 80 or 90 houses on it, hook 'em up to sewer pipes, put roads and ditches down. That's what's destroyed the bay. It ain't us. They let development take over and then, that's it, we're done."

Sadly. much the same thing is happening in Puget Sound.

Irresponsible land use planning plus agricultural runoff is destroying billions of dollars worth of ecological services- most of which likely won't "come back" in our lifetimes.

On the positive side, at least the sound doesn't have pfiesteria to contend with.

[hatrack]

3. That is, they don't have pfiesteria to contend with yet . . .

nt

[phantom power]

4. I heard once that oysters used to filter the bay water at some huge rate...

Something enormous like once every hour.

Talk about biological service.

[Nihil]

6. Yep ... then people eat them!

Nice little cycle isn't it?

Human eats oyster -> Human dumps waste in water -> Oyster filters waste -> Human eats oyster ...

:hi:

[applegrove]

5. How sad. What would James Michener say if he were to rewrite Chesapeake today.