Sustainable Oystering: Almost an Oxymoron
By Bob Lewis, As Told To Toby Beauregard Edited by Casey Bacon
Originally appearing in Slackwater, Volume 8
Over 25 years later, the Bay and its tributaries are still struggling to live up to the vision set by the Roundtable. Despite the group’s best efforts, the oyster population in the Bay would see its worst figures in mean prevalence of both dermo and MSX in 1999, 2001, and 2002.
In that last year, another local group, the St. Mary’s Watershed Association, came on the scene to not only improve the watershed area environmentally but work towards improving the landscape for its socioeconomic and cultural significance. Bob Lewis, a New York native with degrees in education, psychology, and performance, found his way into what he calls the “theater for social change” in Southern Maryland over twenty years ago and has been involved with the Watershed Association since its creation. Recently, the group has concentrated on oyster restoration efforts in the local area—with mixed results. According to a 2017 Maryland Department of Natural Resources (MDDNR) report on the state’s oyster population, in a survey of 265 oysters bars in Maryland’s waters, the highest spat set—that is, the area where oyster larvae permanently attach—in that study was in a section of the St. Mary’s River. However, 2020 measurements by MDDNR found that the projected number of oysters less than a year old—275 million—sits at the sixth lowest on record since 1999; moreover, the group concluded in their 2017 study that the oysters at every standard disease monitoring bar were affected with the parasites that cause dermo disease. The Chesapeake Bay Foundation’s annual Water Quality report for 2018 seemed no more promising: with a trend of increasing rainfall over the past few years—one that continues into the present day—there’s a greater influx of runoff chemicals like phosphorous and nitrogen that harm water quality levels. For Bob Lewis, however, the biggest issue for oysters in 2020 is a threat far less biological.
For the past two years now, we [the Association] have been fairly focused on oyster habitat restoration. The oyster restoration project has been immensely rewarding... Now we have better monitoring and are looking at the conditions out there with more critical eyes and test equipment. [But] we still have persistent problems in the [St. Mary’s] River, and I sometimes question whether the oyster restoration is going to be enough. It certainly is vital and critical, but I don’t think it’s going to be enough. Our persistent problem out there is low dissolved oxygen. I will say that we started working aggressively with oyster restoration in 2009. In the past eleven years, [the] one theme, one question, and one idea that keeps coming back to me from our constituents, from our members, [and from] those volunteers we may engage with is: Do you think we will ever be able to stop the harvest of the wild oyster? The people that say this recognize that the oyster [and] its ecosystem services have an enormous value to our aquatic environment; as a filter feeder, as a builder of structures, and the [creator] of habitat[s] with enormous diversity and, hopefully, health because of that.
I think the recruitment of oysters is just plummeting in the Chesapeake Bay right now because there are just not enough oysters out there to reproduce. I have extensively studied fisheries management science, and what the science tells you is that when you harvest [a] species down by eighty percent, so only twenty percent remain, their actual reproduction potential will increase. It’s kind of nature’s way of responding to that harvest. Well, the science is clear that with oysters, that’s not true. In fact, oysters reproduce best when there are lots of them in high density. So, as we harvest the density of oysters down to the levels they’re [at] in the Bay now, their reproduction is compromised.
I’ve always been somewhat resistant to the concept [of sanctuaries] because that is my roots, commercial fishing. When we say we’re not going to harvest the commercial oyster anymore, I mean, it kinda just grabs at my heart. It grabs at my heritage. But I’m on that page now. The concept of ending the wild fishery is just not popular. But that said, I don’t believe that that native oysters can be a sustainable fishery. [I] think it’s almost an oxymoron to put “sustainable” and “fishery” with oysters together like that. Certainly, if we [have] a very limited harvest— maybe ten, twenty percent of what’s in an area— then it would be shut down so it can recover, and if it were done in a way that was not damaging to a structure that the oysters create. But that’s not how we do it. As long as we keep using heavy equipment and destructive measures, we keep taking away the oyster’s ability to reproduce and survive.
[The Upper St. Mary’s River] became a sanctuary back in October 2010, so we’ve had that sanctuary for about nine harvest years. That [an early 2020 incident involving oyster poaching] would be
"The St. Mary’s River is my connection. It’s my way of saying, "I'm doing something; I'm doing something to combat those problems."
A restoration effort underway under the guidance of the St. Mary's River Watershed Association.
the fourth incident, that I know, of poaching. I think the real problem is not somebody who wants to go and grab a few oysters to eat. It’s the commercial industry. Because they take a lot, and they’re very destructive when they do it.
More likely than actual sanctuary areas [are] what just started in the St. Mary’s River this year, and they’re called reserve areas. I’m [calling] reserve areas a bridge to harvest wild oysters from what we do today to the management system we’ll need in the future. They identified an area, about seven acres, in a place they call Green Pond. It’s off of Historic St. Mary’s City’s property, south of the Dove dock. They planted seven thousand bushels of oyster shells in the hopes of recruiting the natural larvae. And the watermen agree to this; the St. Mary’s County watermen, the Oyster Committee, the Maryland Department of Natural Resources, and the Natural Resources Police [who] are supposed to now enforce that. There will be no harvest there... until the oysters are large enough to reach market size [≥76 mm].
Our human condition, and the planet where we reside, is facing two debilitating, potentially critical environmental issues. The St. Mary’s River is my connection to those issues. I cannot stop global warming, and I cannot stop the separation of wealth in the world today. If we don’t get a handle on both of them, and get a handle on them soon, we might be looking at what[ever] we’re going to name the next era after the Anthropocene. But the St. Mary’s River is my connection. It’s my way of saying, “I’m doing something; I’m doing something to combat those problems.”
[Like] in 2009, when we got a hundred waterfront landowners to steward oysters at their docks. Just six cages of oysters; maybe six thousand oysters total. Just a drop in the bucket as far as what’s needed. But it was an opening of a door for me. How many times did I get a phone call or an email from somebody who says, “My husband wants to fertilize the lawn this afternoon. What’s that going to do to my baby oysters?” It is that opening that allows me to try to bring some sort of greening into local landscapes, some sort of fostering of sustainability and stewardship.
