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Feature: April 3, 1996
Bay in the Balance
An Alumni College Explores the Tenuous Coexistence between Man and Nature in the Chesapeake By J. I. Merritt '66 Our task for the moment is baiting and setting 15 crab traps, or "pots," which are wire-mesh cages with funneled openings that allow a crab to enter but not to exit. Jamie Baxter, a staff member of the Chesapeake Bay Foundation (CBF), our host for the college, plucks a dead fish from the bait bucket and holds it over the first pot. "Have you ever kissed a menhaden?" he asks. His question, while mainly rhetorical, is also an invitation of sorts. The oil of menhaden, he tells us, is used in lipstick, so in a sense the answer for most of us is yes. Menhaden carcasses are also the bait of choice for watermen pursuing the Chesapeake's fabled blue crab, and Baxter would have us believe that for luck they will sometimes kiss one before placing it in a crab pot. The menhaden smells rank and drips with oil, and his call for a volunteer to render the ceremonial smooch has only one taker. To cheers and applause, Adrienne Seymour s'66 gamely puckers and goes lip-to-lip with the fish. "But I'm not licking it!" she protests. With a twist, Baxter breaks open the carcass and slips it into the pot. As the boat circles, we bait and toss overboard one pot after another. Orange buoys mark their positions. We will be back in two days to retrieve them. In 1608, a year after Captain John Smith sailed into Chesapeake Bay to found his colony at Jamestown, Virginia, he declared that ". . . heaven and earth never agreed better to frame a place for man's habitation." Smith's settlement numbered a hundred souls. Nearly four centuries later, the bay and its watershed, which drains six states and extends as far north as Cooperstown, New York, support a population of 15 million. When Smith dropped anchor here, the Chesapeake teemed with waterfowl and fish of every sort. Pollution and overfishing have since taken their toll, yet the bay's nutrient-rich waters still produce half the U.S. harvest of blue crabs and nurture 90 percent of the striped bass caught by fishermen between North Carolina and Maine. Crab pots set, the Loni-Carol II returns to tiny Port Isobel, an island where the CBF operates one of its 16 education centers. Our accommodations there are spartan but comfortable, with bunk beds and self-composting toilets in a dormitory dedicated to the memory of Jody Bond s'56. Following "toddy time" and an ample dinner of crab cakes, we assemble in the dining hall to hear an overview of the bay by biologist Mike Hirshfield '70, a former CBF staffer who now works for the Center for Marine Conservation in Washington, D.C. He starts at the beginning, at the waning of the last ice age 10,000 years ago, when melting glaciers raised sea levels and flooded the lower valley of the Susquehanna River. Today parts of the drowned river lie a hundred feet below the surface, but the bay averages only 21 feet in depth, and large areas of it are less than six feet deep. It boasts 5,000 miles of tidal shoreline. Twenty-odd rivers and hundreds of creeks flow into it, carrying nutrients and creating a rich and complex brew of fresh, brackish, and salt water. In such shallow water, sunlight penetrates to the bottom, promoting the growth of aquatic grasses, which along with the bay's tidal wetlands serve as nursery areas for much of its fisheries. But too many nutrients, we learn, do the bay more harm than good. In recent decades, much of the Chesapeake's bottom grasses have disappeared as a result of algae blooms that have choked off sunlight. The algae thrive on nitrogen and phosphorus, both from sewage effluent and agricultural runoff in the form of chemical fertilizers and manure. Chicken farms on the Eastern Shore produce as much waste as 4 million people, and night soil from all the dairy cows in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, tops the excremental output of Baltimore. "Grasses are the forests and fields of the bay," says Hirshfield, "and they're way down from the 1960s, when in turn they were down from the 1930s." The health report is mixed for other elements of the Chesapeake ecosystem. Tidal and freshwater wetlands, which buffer pollution by filtering and slowing runoff into the bay, are now protected, but only after development had reduced them by more than 50 percent. Woodlands cover just half the acres they did in John Smith's day. Although forests have expanded since mid-century as a result of farmers' putting less land under the plow, the relentless march of suburbs has begun to reverse this encouraging trend. The bay has fewer ducks and migratory geese than it did 30 years ago, but the numbers of bald eagles and wading birds are up. Pelicans, at the northernmost part of their range, have reappeared in the bay, and ospreys have come back since the banning of the pesticide DDT 25 years ago. Most Chesapeake fisheries are troubled. American shad once spawned by the millions in the bay's tributaries-when in residence at Mount Vernon, on the Potomac, George Washington liked nothing better than pulling shad nets-but that was before dams choked off the runs of these anadromous fish. By 1980 the harvest had dropped to 1 percent of historic levels, prompting Maryland and Virginia to close their seasons, which have never reopened. In 1984 Maryland shut down fishing for striped bass-known locally as rockfish, or just "rock"-after their population crashed following decades of overfishing. Virginia later followed suit. In 1990, after several good spawning years, these states again allowed fishing for rock, but with tighter limits, and the species has continued to recover. The American oyster-Crassostrea virginica-is another story. This bivalve is literally synonymous with the Chesapeake, whose name derives from an Indian word meaning "great shellfish bay." Colonists marveled at the bounty of oysters, whose reef-like beds were so thick that vessels ran aground on them. In the 1890s, watermen were taking 11 million bushels a year. As recently as 20 years ago, notes William W. Warner '43 in Beautiful Swimmers, his 1976 prize-winning book on the Chesapeake, Maryland produced more oysters than any other state in the union. But today a commercial oyster fishery scarcely exists on the Chesapeake, and any oysters ordered in restaurants in Baltimore or Washington most likely come from the Gulf or Pacific coasts. Our chance to learn firsthand about oysters comes on the second day of the college, when Lonnie Moore, a veteran waterman and a member of the CBF's education staff, takes us on another cruise aboard the Loni-Carol II. "Twelve years ago," he tells us, "Tangier had 35 boats, each with two or three men, catching up to 35 bushels per man a day. Then six years ago the bottom fell out." The oysters had fallen victims to MSX and "dermo," a pair of diseases that scythed through them like molluscan versions of the Black Death. At least one of the responsible parasites has been present in the bay for a while, and why they struck with such virulence in the 1980s remains a mystery. Speculation focuses on pollution, which may weaken the oyster's immune system, and drought, since MSX thrives in more saline waters. This afternoon we are learning the rudiments of dredging for oysters. There's nothing complicated about the method or the machinery. In size and configuration, an oyster dredge resembles the working end of a cast-iron garden rake, with a chain net that drags behind it. With the boat throttled back and barely making headway, Gus Fleischmann '50 heaves the dredge overboard and after a few minutes hauls in the line hand over hand. The net is empty. "It's one to nothing in favor of the oysters," says Dutch von Schilling '54. On the second haul we're blanked again, but on the third and fourth the net comes up laden. We dump the shells on deck and sort through them. Most are discards, but among the refuse we find perhaps a dozen live oysters, most of them small but a few reaching the three-inch minimum size for harvesting. "I'm happy to see the small stuff, but unhappy to see the big ones that are dead," says Moore. "Even in the best of times, a half to two-thirds of a haul will be old shells." Bob Hoyt '73, a former CBF attorney turned professor of environmental law, notes that archaeologists excavating Indian middens routinely unearth shells a foot long. To grow that big takes 25 years, he says. "The oyster you're looking at here is a different beast." "Anybody want to eat one?" ask Moore. With a few deft strokes of a knife he parts a shell, revealing the succulent gray meat. Von Schilling slurps it down, then declares it "the freshest oyster I've ever eaten." Happily, the bay's striped bass are doing better than its oysters. Just how much better I learn when John Page Williams '65, the veteran CBF staffer who organized our alumni college, takes me on a dawn fishing excursion aboard his 17-foot skiff, aptly named First Light. On this dead-calm morning the run to Tangier Light takes only a few minutes. Williams cuts the engine for a drift through the riptide racing past the rocks that form the light's base. On the third cast I feel a bump at the end of my fly-line, then a solid strike, and soon I've landed my first three stripers ever. Rock on the rocks. The first of these "school" stripers is just 14 inches-nothing like the yard-long leviathans that prowl the mid-Atlantic surf from May through November-but its size takes nothing away from its beauty. Before releasing it, I admire its horizontal patterning of green stripes on silver flanks. With luck, it may live 30 years, grow to 60 pounds, and be caught and released many more times, perhaps as far away as Nova Scotia, the northernmost point of a Chesapeake striper's migratory range. I owe my modest angling success to Williams, whose knowledge of the bay goes back to the late 1940s. A native of Richmond, Virginia, he grew up fishing on the James River and the lower Potomac, where his family kept a summer place. "That's really where I got baywater in my veins and developed my love of rockfish, salt marshes, workboats, and water people," he says. A biology major at Princeton, Williams later taught in secondary schools and worked for Outward Bound. In 1973 he joined the Chesapeake Bay Foundation to run its field trips, a job that has kept him on the water for much of the last 23 years. Observes Bob Hoyt, "Mike Hirshfield and I have always been struck by the lengths John Page will go to fish on company time." Williams says that when he first began fishing in the bay, "it seemed paved with oysters, crabs, and fish." But by the 1960s, he recalls, pollution was killing off the grass beds, and by the 1970s striped bass were in steep decline. "It's a delight to find the rockfish rebounding so strongly now, but with the watershed's human population projected to increase by three million in the next 30 years, we can't take them for granted again, or even our seemingly inexhaustible stock of blue crabs." Crabs are the quarry on our last full day of the college, as we return aboard the Loni-Carol II to check the pots we set 48 hours before. By now we have learned something of the blue crab's ways and mores. We've had a session "scraping" crabs (another commercial method of harvesting them from grass beds with a small dredge), and on a crab shanty off Tangier Island we've watched them scuttling about in shallow tanks, where "peelers" are culled and isolated until they molt into "shedders," or softshell crabs-the Chesapeake supplies 95 percent of the U.S. soft-crab market. Roughly translated, the blue crab's scientific name, Callinectes sapidus, means beautiful, tasty swimmer (hence the title of Warner's book). The "beauty" of crabs may be an acquired esthetic, but anyone who's ever picked a freshly steamed blue crab can attest to its palatability. And they are indeed good swimmers, thanks to a pair of modified hind legs that serve as paddles. The interior muscles that move the paddles are the "lump meat" prized by crab gourmands. A blue crab begins its two-year life cycle as a microscopic larva released from a mass of some two million eggs carried on its mother's abdomen. Soon after hatching, a larva metamorphoses into a creature resembling a tiny crayfish. Following a succession of molts, it acquires the flattened profile of an adult, which in turn may molt 20 more times before reaching sexual maturity. In the Chesapeake, males and females segregate during the winter, when they bury themselves in mud, the males congregating in the bay's upper reaches and females closer to its mouth. In the summer they come together for mating, and the cycle begins anew. Blue crabs are found in coastal waters from Nova Scotia to Argentina. Adaptable and omnivorous, they tolerate pollution and wide ranges in temperature and salinity, and they will eat almost anything, whether animal or vegetable, dead or alive-including other crabs. They are also famously pugnacious, possessed of what one biologist has called a "pissy attitude . . . it's the only thing we catch in the bay that will try to bite back." One indication of the blue crab's heartiness is its ability to withstand fishing pressure. Over the last 50 years, the Chesapeake's annual catch has remained fairly constant, between 50 and 90 million pounds. It has continued to hold up despite an all-out assault during the last decade, when declines in other fisheries have forced watermen to focus all their efforts on crabs. But many now worry that the population has passed the point of maximum sustainable yield and teeters on the brink of collapse. Fisheries managers have been debating the possibilities of "capping" the number of pots allowed on the bay and banning winter dredging for female crabs in the lower bay. Yet in a classic "tragedy of the commons" of the sort that typifies fisheries everywhere, the bay's 14,000 watermen resist any such limitations, even while recognizing their need in the abstract. "In the absence of regulations," says Williams, "a waterman's response is to fish harder. We've seen 'rush hour' on Tangier Island begin earlier and earlier. Boats used to go out at six in the morning, but now you hear them going out at three." The orange buoys make our crab pots easy to spot. With Moore at the helm, the Loni-Carol II approaches the first. Fleishmann, our ablest and most enthusiastic deckhand, gaffs the buoy and hauls up the pot. We count eight crabs clinging to their wire-mesh prison. Jack Krome '41 pries open a seam in the mesh, then turns over the pot and thumps it. The crabs tumble into a tub on deck. Successive hauls bring up six, two, six, one, six, two, and three crabs, along with an assortment of bycatch: a spider crab, a small fish called a spot, and several jellyfish. The ninth haul is a bonanza-10 crabs. Adrienne Seymour is sure it's the pot baited with the menhaden she kissed. By the time we retrieve all 15 pots, the bottom of the tub is thick and crawling with five dozen crabs. The majority are "sooks," or sexually mature females. A blue crab can be sexed by a glance at the outline of its apron, or central breastplate. A sook's is rounded and said to resemble the Capitol dome. By contrast, the apron of a male or "jimmy" crab is long and narrow, like the Washington Monument. We debate whether to keep all our crabs for the finale dinner that night, but decide for conservation's sake to return the females. "Sooks are sweeter," says Moore, "but I'd rather eat jimmies because there's more meat on 'em." Back at the dock, we set up an assembly line for cleaning the crabs: break off the backs, scrape out the gills and guts, spray them down, and layer them in a pot with onions, Old Bay seasoning, and salt for steaming. On our last morning, we gather in the dining room for a recap of the previous three days. When Williams asks for comments on what has struck us most, the responses vary. Several note they had no idea of the size and bounty of the Chesapeake watershed or of the pressures threatening it. Carroll Howe '46, whose father and grandfather were born on Tangier Island, says he's "disconcerted" by the decline of the bay and the impact this has had on the people who depend on its resources. Tangier Island's population is less than half what it was a century ago. Tangier and Smith Island, to the north of it, are the bay's sole remaining islands without bridges to the mainland supporting viable communities. "When my father was born here in 1898," says Howe, "there were two thousand people on the island. They farmed and raised livestock and had big oyster and crabbing industries." For me, the most lasting impression is of the bay's size and richness as an estuary-a vast, shallow petri dish for growing rock, oysters, and crabs. Human beings have mucked it up, but humans can save it, too. I mention the educational efforts of the Chesapeake Bay Foundation and the activism of its 85,000 members. "If you can marshal people in behalf of the ecosystem and get them to think of it as a community from which we all draw sustenance, both physical and spiritual, then you can bring it back." Mike Hirshfield says he's encouraged by some of the changes for the better over the last 10 years. "We can all remember when the Potomac was too polluted to swim in, and now we have major bass tournaments on the river downstream from Washington. We've seen ospreys and rockfish come back. I am a short-term pessimist and a long-term optimist." Jim Merritt '66 is PAW's editor. More information about the Chesapeake Bay Foundation is available from its headquarters, at 162 Prince George Street, Annapolis, MD 21401-9983. |