Gateway to the Bay:
Restoring the Chesapeake Bay Oyster Population
Governor’s Summer Internship Program, August 2017
Noah Jaques Marguerite Madden
UMBC ’18 Duquesne University ‘18
Maryland Historical Trust Governor’s Office of Federal Relations
Victor F. Mercogliano Brittany Day
UMBC ’17 Duke University ‘19
Governor’s Coordinating Offices Office of Minority Health & Health Disparities
Maryland Department of Health
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements………………………………………………………………………………..3
Executive Summary…………………………………………………………………………….....4
Introduction………………………………....…………………………………………………….5
Origin of Problem and Problem Definition………….…………………………………………....5
Current Efforts…………………………………………………………………………….………7
Policy Alternative – Outreach and Education Program.………………………………………...... 9
Policy Alternative – Community Service Partnership.…………….…………………………….12
Policy Alternative – Legislative Action-Stacking Shells Program.…………………………...... 14
Analysis and Recommendations ………………………………………………………………...18
Conclusion……………………………………………………………………………………….20
Works Cited……………………………………………………………………………………...20
Acknowledgements
This policy analysis would not have been possible without the support of the following individuals:
Governor Larry Hogan
Lieutenant Governor Boyd Rutherford
Honorable Staff and Cabinet Members
Hannah Schmitz -University of Maryland, Baltimore County
Dr. Laura Hussey- University of Maryland, Baltimore County
Tiffany Waddell- Office of Federal Relations
Elizabeth Hughes-Maryland Historic Trust
Shalewa Noel-Thomas- Office of Minority Health & Health Disparities
Patrick Lally- Governor’s Coordinating Offices
Chris Judy- Department of Natural Resources
Thomas Price- Oyster Recovery Partnership
Bob Lewis- Scantic River Watershed Association Conservancy
Wayne Witzke- Oyster Recovery Partnership
Dr. Don Merritt- University of Maryland, Center for Environmental Science
John Bacon- Town of Chesapeake Beach
Heather North- Chesapeake Bay Foundation
Elle O’Brien- Midshore Riverkeeper
Eric Conrad- Oyster Recovery Partnership
Patrick Beall- Chesapeake Bay Foundation
Kara Skipper- National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association
Jana Davis- Chesapeake Bay Trust
Kacey Wetzel- Chesapeake Bay Trust
Britt Slattery- Department of Natural Resources
James Dumhart-Piney Point Hatchery
Executive Summary
The Chesapeake Bay's oyster population today has dwindled to just 1 percent of historic levels, as overharvesting, habitat loss and disease have taken their toll. As it stands, oysters currently in the Bay are not creating enough offspring to support full population recovery. There are current efforts such as the Marylanders Grow Oysters program that steer the oyster population back in the right direction.
Solutions
1. Maryland county schools can partner with environmental organizations to immerse schoolchildren in an environmental science curriculum. Broadening partnerships between MGO and Maryland county schools by creating an established competitive grant program for Maryland county schools would complete such an effort.
2. Currently, ORP uses completely volunteer work to build the cages needed for the program, but this aspect of oyster restoration would be bettered if homeless citizens could get job training and perhaps a future job through the growing aquaculture sector in Maryland. By training a group of homeless people as a unit, better skills development for this group could occur.
3. There is currently an Oyster Shell Tax Income Credit Recycling Program that is set to abrogate as of June 30, 2018. This tax credit program has produced tangible successful results with more restaurants claiming the credit and recycling more bushels of shells each year. The renewal of this program would demonstrate Maryland’s dedication towards helping local businesses and environmental salvation.
Introduction
The Chesapeake Bay's oyster population today has dwindled to just 1 percent of historic levels, as overharvesting, habitat loss and disease have taken their toll. Current oyster restoration efforts such as the Marylanders Grow Oysters Program give testimony to the persistence of Marylanders to positively impact their environment. Our policy recommendations such as an environmental outreach grant, a bridge-the-gap program, and a lucrative incentive program look to build upon the success of these current efforts. The Native Americans way of life, which allowed for the environment and people to thrive cohesively, inspired our group to dedicate our efforts towards restoring the Bay. Our policy recommendations would renew that eco-friendly management and allow Maryland to serve as the leading model for environmental salvation.
Origin of Problem and Problem Definition
The Smithsonian, with the help of Torben Rick’s team of scientists, went about establishing what oyster populations were before the European settlement of America compared to today by comparing the oysters in middens, or garbage heaps, used by Native Americans to oysters harvested today.[i] More specifically, the team tested organic matter in those Native American middens as well as contemporary oyster matter for the decay of radioactive carbon 14, which returns an approximation of the date at which an organism died.[ii] The resulting analysis shows that oyster numbers indeed decreased after European contact of North America, with the population actually decreasing to less than one percent of historic levels.[iii]
Locating where things began to go awry for the oyster population is not difficult: overharvesting, habitat loss and disease have all taken their toll on the oyster population. The introduction of dredges—steel basket-like devices dragged across the bottom—and other destructive harvesting techniques ripped out about three-quarters of the bay’s oyster reefs between 1860 and 1920.[iv] As it stands, oysters in the bay are not creating enough offspring to support full population recovery. Oyster harvests tumbled by two-thirds between the 1890s and 1930, but then remained relatively stable at a lower level until the 1950s. Then a pair of diseases hit. MSX and Dermo are both caused by parasites that attack and frequently kill oysters, although they are harmless to people. Compounded by continued overharvesting and pollution, these diseases devastated oyster populations in the Chesapeake. The losses to disease were especially severe in the 1980s, and have tended to be worse in Virginia than in Maryland because both parasites thrive in the saltier waters of the Southern Bay. But Maryland has also suffered, with oyster reefs in this state’s portion of the Bay declining by about 80 percent in the last 25 years alone. From about 1990-2010, oyster harvests fell by 90 percent and the number of oystermen has plummeted by 75 percent.[v]
To establish the importance of oysters in the bay, Shark Research Center Intern Nicole Suren of the University of Miami explains, “Oysters are not only a preferred dish of much of the human population, but they are also very important parts of the ecosystems [that] they inhabit.”[vi] This is because they do not merely “participate” in the habitat they settle in, but “improve” it by filtering large volumes of water and forming reefs that other organisms can use as shelter.[vii] Oysters were once able to filter all the water in the bay in about a week, and “the sharp decrease in the number of oysters means that it now takes the current oyster population about a year to filter the same amount of water.”[viii] Oyster populations are not what they were centuries ago, and oysters being a critical part of the bay’s ecosystem is also clear. It is of utmost significance to dedicate efforts towards oyster restoration because the size of the oyster population has decreased sharply, and it is an important part of the bay’s ecosystem.
Most important to convey here is that the reality is that the bay’s situation is not hopeless, although it is highly important and endangered. The Chesapeake Bay Foundation’s State of the Bay Report of 2016 explains that the Bay is “reaching a tipping point.” They explain that “we are seeing the clearest water in decades, regrowth of acres of lush underwater grass beds, and the comeback of the Chesapeake’s native oysters, which were nearly eradicated by disease, pollution, and overfishing.”[ix] While the past cannot be entirely returned to, evidence of what worked for Native Americans before the arrival of Europeans, namely living with nature for mutual benefit, suggests that establishing new sanctuaries in the Bay can help roll back some of the damage done by dredging, which takes oyster homes with them.[x] There is measurable improvement in the bay’s health since positive human action, and therefore there is strong evidence of humankind’s ability to produce positive impact on the bay’s ecology by increasing its oyster population.
Current Efforts
In 1993, the ‘Oyster Roundtable,’ a group of organizations, institutions, elected officials, businesses and individuals in Maryland created an action plan for oyster recovery.[xi] In 1994, this group became the Oyster Recovery Partnership. Most recently in 2010, Maryland designated 24 percent of the Oyster Bay as off-limits for harvesting. Finally, the federal agency of NOAA has been instrumental in leading restoration efforts with the goal of reintroducing native oysters to 10 tributaries by 2025. This is coherent with the goals set by Executive Order 13508 and the 2014 Chesapeake Bay Watershed Agreement. That goal was to restore native oyster habitat and populations in ten tributaries by 2025 and ensure their protection.[xii] In short, there are many efforts that have remained ongoing due to their degree of successes. For example, per the 2016 Maryland Oyster Restoration Update, Harris Creek had successfully achieved its goal of 350 acres of restored oyster reef.[xiii] The full restoration of Harris Creek took five years, 2011-2016, and serves as a promising model for other tributaries.
Another successful program is Marylanders Grow Oysters (MGO). Started in the Tred Avon River in 2008, MGO is an environmental stewardship program managed by the Maryland Department of Natural Resources in conjunction with the Oyster Recovery Partnership, the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science, and the Department of Public Safety and Correctional Services.[xiv] The program was designed with the intentions of having waterfront residents’ help with oyster restoration in small scale, local oyster projects.[xv]
Currently, there are over 2,000 participants, 30 tributary areas, and 7,000 cages that are all working together to protect the young oysters during their first year of life.[xvi] By suspending the spat from private piers so they can be successfully grown and then planted on local sanctuaries, MGO is helping each day to strengthen the ecosystem and the oyster population at the planting sites under MGO stewardship.[xvii] MGO currently operates by local volunteer coordinators that are usually a river-group or a community association, such as the Midshore Riverkeeper Conservancy, the Town of Chesapeake Beach, or the Severn River Association.[xviii] Despite offering no charge to participants, MGO takes the rewards of their program very seriously. Both personally and ecologically, members of MGO are not only helping to restore the oyster population in their local area, but they are also working to create a greater abundance of fish and live bottom for Bay life on sanctuaries that are closed to harvesting.[xix] Our goal is to build on these successful programs by implementing an educational outreach grant, establishing a cooperative partnership between Paul’s Place, the Department of Natural Resources, and Oyster Recovery Partnership, and pursuing legislative action that supplies a foundational aspect of oyster restoration in Maryland.
Policy Alternative 1- Outreach and Education Program
One policy option that addresses Maryland’s environmental literacy initiative is to better enhance the current outreach and education programs for oyster restoration, specifically through MGO. As Governor Hogan stated in his Executive Order of Project Green Classrooms, “All youth should have the opportunity to learn about the environment, develop a connection with nature, and have a sense of place in their local natural surroundings…”[xx] For Maryland county schools, it is essential that realistic and attainable measures are taken to increase environmental literacy rates and get school students interested about the environment, regardless of their year in school. MGO is a quintessential example of a program that can be broadened to better reach this goal of enhancing environmental literacy rates. By creating an established competitive grant program for Maryland public schools, MGO will not only get more students involved in oyster restoration, but they will enhance students’ environmental literacy rates by building invaluable hands-on learning experiences in and out of the classroom.
Since MGO got its start in 2008, one of the by-products that has been created is the building of local partnerships with Maryland county schools. Despite having never reached out to Maryland schools directly, MGO has an estimated 5,000 students in 15 schools as recently as 2017 that have been involved in MGOs mission to grow baby oysters.[xxi] These partnerships have been created through MGO coordinators and volunteers and have resulted in many positive, unexpected benefits that go beyond MGOs founding focus on private pier owners. By using oysters and cages provided by MGO, numerous Maryland schools have started to incorporate oyster restoration programs through a multidisciplinary curriculum, even if they are located in a non-MGO area.[xxii] Some of these schools include Mayo Elementary School, Somerset Intermediate School, and St. Mary’s College.[xxiii] If MGO establishes a competitive grant, they will be able to expand on their existing education programs in order to give more Maryland students the ability to truly immerse themselves in environmental science curriculum focused on oyster restoration. In addition, students will effectively meet several of the environmental education key learning areas that are outlined by the State Board of Education and achieve the outdoor experience Governor Hogan emphasized in the signing of his executive order of Project Green Classrooms this past June.
With the enactment made in 2011 by the State Board of Education, all public schools, from pre-school to graduation, were required to meet environmental education standards.[xxiv] This code of Maryland Regulations is stated in Title 13A State Board of Education, Subtitle 04 Specific Subjects, Chapter 17, Environmental Education, and states that “Each local school system shall provide in public schools a comprehensive, multi-disciplinary environmental education program within current curricular offerings that is aligned with the Maryland Environmental Literacy Curriculum.”[xxv] The environmental education learning criteria is measured in eight key areas; (1) environmental issues, (2) interactions of earth’s systems, (3) flow of matter and energy, (4) populations, communities, and ecosystems, (5) humans and natural resources, (6) environment and health, (7) environment and society, (8) sustainability.[xxvi]
Since this code’s been enacted, there has been a great deal of both small and large scale education programs set forth to help students achieve the outlined standards. For instance, one of the MGO partner schools, Rock Hall Elementary School in Kent County, had a teacher who initiated their own oyster restoration project for her science class. By taking students out to their local harbor and placing oyster cages in the water, this teacher helped grow oysters and show her students the hands-on practice the process entails. A more wide-reaching program is the Maryland Environmental Literacy Partnership (M.E.L.P.). This program was created in 2012 and currently works with nine Maryland county schools to engage students in the environment through an “issues investigation framework.”[xxvii] These two examples, as well as many others that have been made possible due to efforts at the national, state, and local level, have all contributed to higher environmental literacy rates throughout the state.