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You all are probably pretty tired of hearing about Oysters, so this will be the last one for a while.   I’ve been posting a lot about the festival but haven’t shown a single oyster. I also haven’t said much about them.  So this post will be about the shellfish itself.  

Oysters were once the most plentiful thing in the Bay.   In fact, before Maryland was known for crabs, it was known for oysters.   Why shouldn’t it be.  When MD was settled you couldn’t go 10 feet into the bay without finding an oyster bed.  Not only have they been plentiful,  but they are delicious and easy to eat.  MD oysters are a good, middle of the road oyster.  Not too sweet or buttery like the upper west coast oysters and not too salty like the upper east coast oysters, our oysters are a great middle ground.  Our oyster beds also used to also be huge, growing oysters up to 10 inches.  

Like the crabs, Oysters are quickly disappearing from the bay.  Unlike Crabs, they are disappearing at a much faster rate.   Here’s a quick link to help understand the problem.  If you go to the section titled Oyster Landings, you can see that the harvest which used to be in the order of Millions of bushells is now down to less than 45,000. 

For further reading: here’s a recent study from the DNR webpage.  Read the whole thing if you are interested in the statistical methods behind oyster population estimates, but if you aren’t that interested, you can just go to page 13, which shows the oyster populations between the mid 90’s which was estimated in the 700,000 range and in the mid ’00’s when the population was estimated in the 350K range.   

So what happened?  Well a few things happened.  Most recently, the lower areas of the bay have been afflicted with Oyster killing parasites.   There is also a clear problem with over-harvesting.  

Not that this is the full cause of over-harvesting, but here’s an anecdote I picked up this weekend.  The government began to allow people to lease space at the bottom of the bay to grow oysters for themselves at the beginning of the 20th century.  Apparently this worked well for some, but for others, instead of using this as a space to grow oysters, which consumes energy and time, they would use their leased space to hold oysters they took from public beds until they were ready to sell them.   I like this story just because its an example of a government policy that was sort of intended to protect harvest areas and to promote oyster growth, but which was used for just the opposite purpose.

So, when I’ve told these things to people over the last few days I’ve gotten some interesting responses.  Everything from “what can you do” to “did you sign a petition.”  The strange thing is that there are few petitions to sign and it seemed like the most common way to help the bay was to spread the word.  So that’s what I’m doing here.  

 …

For those who would like to help more:  there are plenty of ways.  There’s an active discourse on the desirability of introducing foreign oysters to the bay.  If you care and if you can help, let a legislator (state or federal) know about it.   There are also studies being done regarding the parasite populations and the regrowth of plant life in the bay.   These studies and the organizations doing them can always use extra funding and maybe extra help.  You can even volunteer to help ”garden” new oysters.  The easiest things for any of us to do are not pollute the bay (remember that means the inner harbor too) and buy a bay plate if you are an MD citizen who is about to get a new car/truck/or van.  

     

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 23rd, 2008 at 12:05 AM and is filed under St. Mary's. You can follow any comments to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a comment, or trackback from your own site.