Blue Crab

Maryland Blue Crab, originally uploaded by Lostwave.

They have finally stopped harvesting crabs in the winter in Virginia.

REEDVILLE, Virginia (Reuters) - It doesn't look like a disaster area.

Crab boats dart back and forth on this inlet of the Chesapeake Bay as they have for generations. On the shore, million-dollar vacation homes catch the morning sun.

But watermen aren't pulling blue crabs out of the Bay this winter. After years of decline, the U.S. Commerce Department declared the fishery a federal disaster last September and Maryland and Virginia shut it down until spring.

It was a symbolic as well as an economic blow for the men who harvest the region's defining culinary treat.

Fisherman are complaining, but they took to many. The winter fishery should have been closed years ago because of declining stock. Virginia has been a very poor steward of the Chesapeake Bay. Virginians were illigally fishing in Maryland waters in 1692 and have not realy stopped screwing up the bat since.

Save The Bay

The old bumper sticker slogan used to be everywhere in Maryland. We seem to have forgotten to do it. It made some progress in the late 80's and early 90's. The states beloved rockfish came back but since then the population of people and chickens overwhelmed it.

Since 1972, the Clean Water Act has helped restore many of America's waters, allowing fish and humans to swim safely in them. But the largest estuary in the US, the Chesapeake Bay, remains in trouble and little changed. The problem? More than two decades of efforts have fallen foul to complexity, size, and lack of political will.

Americans deserve a pat on the back for gradually understanding that water knows no political boundaries and that cleanup efforts must include an entire watershed (or planet, in the case of global warming). But all the players must do their part, and the save-the-bay project in this mid-Atlantic estuary shows just how tough that is to accomplish.[...]

Waste from farms and sewage plants, airborne pollutants, and runoff from developed areas collect in the bay's 64,000-square-mile watershed. They contribute to algae blooms that deplete oxygen, creating areas where creatures such as crabs and oysters can't breathe.

Since 1983, the bay's crab harvest is down 60 percent while the oyster harvest is off by 96 percent, though some of this is due to overharvesting. In about that same time frame, the human population in the watershed is up by 34 percent.

It is time to stop harvesting oysters. There is no real fishery left. I am no biologist however the clam fishing industry must cause incredible destruction to the bay grasses that are so important to young life in the bay. Clams live over a foot deep in the sand and silf the bay floor and a depth of two to three feet bays of the floor is disturbed in the process of extracting the clams. The silt then floats in the currents and tide over grass beds and young oysters killing them. It must stop.

Destroying The Oceans

One little fish at a time.

Per capita meat consumption more than doubled over the past half-century as the global economy expanded. It is expected to double again by 2050. Which raises the question, what does all that meat eat before it becomes meat?

Increasingly the answer is very small fish harvested from the ocean and ground into meal and pressed into oil. According to a new report by scientists from the University of British Columbia and financed by the Pew Institute for Ocean Science, 37 percent by weight of all the fish taken from the ocean is forage fish: small fish like sardines and menhaden. Nearly half of that is fed to farmed fish; most of the rest is fed to pigs and poultry.

The problem is that forage fish are the feedstock of marine mammals and birds and larger species of fish. In other words, farmed fish, pigs and poultry — and the humans who eat them — are competing for food directly with aquatic species that depend on those forage fish for their existence. It’s as if humans were swimming in schools in the ocean out-eating every other species.

The case is worse than that. When it comes to farmed fish, there is a net protein loss: it takes three pounds of fish feed to produce one pound of farmed salmon. This protein pyramid — small fish fed to farmed fish, pigs and poultry that are then fed to humans — is unsustainable. It threatens the foundation of oceanic life.

Here in Maryland's Chesapeake Bay much of the menhaden is caught. The town of Northeast for many years had the largest commercial catch of any town in the country because of the menhaden. Now they are just catching a fraction of what they used to catch. Rockfish, the Maryland state fish, love menhaden. But now you will find rockfish feeding on blue crabs. Sadly, the blue crab has declined precipitously in the bay. The waterman and a way of life is soon to be lost forever.
Via Cab Drollery.

Oysters Go Electric

A marine biologist from New York has come up with a new way to help the oyster come back.

Solar panels perched atop poles provide the helixes with a low voltage. The current causes a chemical reaction in seawater, and limestone builds up on the electrified metal. The ready supply of shell-building minerals, Cervino says, will help the oysters, decimated here and elsewhere by overharvesting, pollution, and disease. Cervino's collaborator, Thomas Goreau, president of the Global Coral Reef Alliance, has shown that electrification can help damaged coral reefs regenerate. It seems to be helping the oysters here as well, he says. Oysters in mesh sacks at the spirals' base are alive while control oysters – those farther from the electric field – have all died.

Perhaps they will try this in the Chesapeake Bay. We need to do something to bring back the oysters. The oysters are needed to bring the bay back to health.

Don Boesch, president of the Univer­sity of Maryland Center for Environ­­mental Science in Cam­bridge, Md., calls oysters "the coral reefs of the East Coast." Oyster-restoration projects are at various stages in Florida, South Carolina, Chesapeake Bay, New York, and New Jersey. Before European settlement, oyster reefs covered some 350 square miles around New York. Their importance as a species stems from their ability to filter large amounts of water. Depending on its size, an oyster filters between 5 and 50 gallons of water daily. Water now murky with algae and other organic matter was, in earlier times, almost certainly clear.[...]

The oysters used to filter the entire bay every three to four days. Even 20 years ago the bay still produced a couple million bushels a year. Then the diseases arrived. By last year, the harvest had dropped to 100,000 bushels. The oysters that remain now manage to filter the bay three to four times a year.