Bay Journal

Scientists Raise Alarm as North American Bird Populations Plummet

November 14, 2019 by Bay Journal Leave a Comment

It’s hard to imagine a world without birds chirping outside in the morning or during a stroll in the woods. But a new study has found that birds are in serious decline across North America, including in the Chesapeake Bay region.

There are nearly 3 billion fewer birds in North America than there were in 1970 — a 29% decline during a single human lifetime, according to the study published in October by the journal Science. The study was done by eight scientists with government and private bird research organizations in the United States and Canada.

Populations of even the most common species that people see at backyard bird feeders or outside have plummeted — think cardinals, titmice, wrens, goldfinches, house finches, sparrows and blue jays, to name just a few.

The decline of one of the most ubiquitous kinds of wildlife may be the strongest evidence yet that Earth’s ecosystems are in trouble. The study warned that birds, which are widely monitored, are prime signals of environmental health. Birds are important pollinators and seed dispersers, and they keep insect populations in check. They also drive a considerable economic industry from birdwatchers who feed them and chase them around the country.

The factors that are driving down bird populations are accelerating, and the study warns that, unless those threats are addressed, some species will be in danger of collapse.

“It’s alarming. It makes me feel like we are trashing the planet and we need to do things in a better way,” said David Curson, director of bird conservation at Audubon Maryland/DC. “I’ve seen these trends for quite a few years. This study just kind of brings it all together and lays it out for the public to see that we have really damaged our environment.”

One of the study’s authors, Michael J. Parr, who also is president of the American Bird Conservancy, said the numbers show “the global wildlife crisis has arrived in our backyards.” A National Geographic writer called the bird plummet “a state of quiet freefall.”

The study’s researchers pored over 50 years of annual bird surveys — many by citizen scientists — as well as government counts and radar data from weather satellites that have been used to track swarms of migrating birds at night.

The study found that the Baltimore oriole, so important to baseball fans in Maryland, has dipped by about one-third since 1970.

Among those suffering the most alarming declines are birds that depend on shoreline and marsh habitat, including those that are emblematic of the Chesapeake Bay.

These shorebirds and wading birds around the Bay are currently not threatened but are on the Maryland Department of Natural Resources’ list of birds most in need of conservation: great egret, glossy ibis, brown pelican, laughing gull, least tern and spotted sandpiper.

Together, shorebirds are down by 17 million, or 37%, across North America. Red-winged blackbirds, found around almost any wet spot in Bay country, are down by 439 million.

Most of the bird problems along the Bay are due to climate change, said Bryan Watts, director of the Center for Conservation Biology at the College of William and Mary and Virginia Commonwealth University.

Rises in water levels from a warming planet are burying vital habitat at the water’s edge, he said. “When you look out on the marshes, it looks fairly similar to what it did, but it’s no surprise when you look at the small numbers [of birds] because they can’t produce any young due to inundation.“

Case in point: the eastern black rail, as recently as 1990, was a common bird found in marshes along the Bay. Now, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, citing more frequent inundation of nests from more frequent storms and increasingly high tides, has proposed listing the bird as threatened. A final decision was expected in October.

The largest drop in North American bird populations is among grassland species such as meadowlarks, whip-poor-wills and horned larks. American sparrows, once a common sight in yards, had the largest single falloff in population, at 717 million, or 53%.

The disappearance of grassland birds makes Curson especially sad. “They’re charismatic birds with beautiful songs that used to be a feature of people’s childhood in the landscape in Maryland and elsewhere.”

Not all birds showed declines. Raptors, wild turkeys and waterfowl such as geese and ducks showed large gains. Raptors are protected and waterfowl and turkeys each have dedicated conservation programs, largely paid by hunters, to preserve their habitats. In the Bay region, ospreys, eagles and other birds of prey have actually increased because they have been targeted by multiyear restoration programs.

The results of the study have grabbed headlines, but the researchers did not delve into the reasons for the striking declines. Other scientists and bird experts, though, have a ready list of reasons.

Chief among them is the loss or degradation of bird habitat. Development, forest fragmentation from energy extraction and changes in farming practices all contribute to loss of the habitat that birds need for eating, shelter and migration.

The study noted that all of the main habitats that birds depend on, from grassland to forests to coastal areas, are disappearing.

“Fragmented habitats, like you see in suburbia, make many birds more susceptible to predation — especially nest and egg predators — parasites, disease and changes in climate,” said Aaron Haines, an associate professor of conservation biology at Millersville University in Pennsylvania.

“There has been fairly dramatic urban expansion [during the study’s 50-year period] in the Bay region,” Watts said. “In urban areas, the predator density from cats and raccoons is just too high.”

Plenty of other stressors also are converging to dent bird populations, experts said.

Among them: feral and pet cats that roam outside, climate change that disrupts migration patterns, window strikes, lighted building strikes, cell tower and wind turbine mortality, West Nile virus and pesticides that both kill birds directly and the insects they need for food.

“It’s like death from one thousand cuts. It’s many reasons,” Watts said.

What can be done?

Many experts advocate for people to make their yards more bird friendly by planting flowers, shrubs and trees that feed and shelter birds. After all, lawns make up about 40 million acres across the United States.

Trees that produce berries, such as hawthorn, dogwood, crabapple, holly and winterberry, are especially helpful. Two websites that offer tips for improving backyard habitat are the National Audubon Society (audubon.org) and National Wildlife Federation (nwf.org).

While Curson endorses individual steps to help birds, he thinks it will take collective activism by the public to push lawmakers and local government officials to adopt policies that help birds. He especially wants to see a reduction in the use of pesticides and a decrease in greenhouse gases that cause climate change.

“This is a political problem, and this needs advocacy,” he said.

Dan Ardia, who has studied birds at Franklin & Marshall College in Pennsylvania, said, “The most frustrating aspect to me is that many of these impacts can be minimized if there was public will, especially as it relates to cats and to reducing evening lighting in buildings.”

One current focus of conservationists is to get Congress to pass the Recovering America’s Wildlife Act, which would dedicate $1.4 billion annually to states for the conservation of declining wildlife populations, including birds.

Researchers involved with the study noted that the restoration successes of waterfowl, eagles, ospreys and other species show that wildlife can be brought back with legislation and conservation action.

The possibility of a near-birdless landscape shakes the soul of Bruce Carl, a birdwatcher in Akron, PA. “To walk along a trail in the woods and have it be consistently silent no matter where you would go would be very disappointing,” he said.

“I just can’t imagine a time when this would be possible. Hoping that day never comes.”

By Ad Crable

Maryland Leaders at Odds Over Fees for Livestock Operations

November 12, 2019 by Bay Journal 1 Comment

When Maryland vastly expanded the number of farms with large numbers of animals that would require stormwater permits, it offered a grace period on fees to encourage farmers to enroll.

That was in 2009. After 10 years and two governors — one Democrat, one Republican — the Maryland Department of the Environment has continued to waive the annual charge, allowing farmers to avoid at least $4 million in payments over the span.

A state law passed last spring bars MDE from waiving the fees any longer. How much farmers will pay, though, depends on the outcome of a fight that is pitting a key state lawmaker and the Maryland Attorney General’s Office against the MDE.

Lawmakers left it up to MDE to decide how much to charge. The agency has proposed requiring farms to pay a fee once every five years, which is the length of the permit.

Fees can range from $60 to $800 depending on the size of the operation.

Those proposed fees are half the amount currently on the books and would be assessed just once, instead of each year of the permit’s five-year life. They would still bring in revenue — just not as much as advocates had hoped. It works out to about $425,000 less per year going to MDE compared with the totals called for — but not collected — under the existing law.

State Sen. Paul Pinsky (D-Prince George’s County), one of the new law’s main sponsors, accuses MDE of intentionally undermining the measure’s intent: to ensure the agency has the resources it needs to enforce environmental protections.

“The fees define the ability to provide oversight and enforcement,” Pinsky said.

The Attorney General’s Office has sided with Pinsky. In an Oct. 22 letter, Assistant Attorney General Sandra Benson Brantley criticized MDE’s plan to fill the program’s funding gap with other revenue sources. She pointed to a separate statute that requires the agency to calculate fees so that they “cover the cost of the permit procedure.”

The permits relate to the largest type of animal farms, known as concentrated animal feeding operations, or CAFOs.

Following a change in federal CAFO regulations in 2008, Maryland updated its regulatory program to cover more smaller operations than previously had been affected by the rules, including poultry operations with as few as 37,500 chickens.

As a result, the number of regulated animal feeding operations grew from approximately a dozen to more than 500.

The change had a particularly large impact on the Eastern Shore, where hundreds of broiler chicken farms began receiving higher scrutiny for the way they handle polluted runoff.

For several years, environmental groups have criticized MDE, which oversees the CAFO program, for waiving the permit fees. “We all must pay our fair share in order to fund the agencies responsible for oversight and enforcement of the laws that protect us,” said Kathy Phillips, executive director of the Assateague Coastal Trust, which lobbied extensively for this year’s changes.

Starting to collect fees offers “an opportunity to increase the funds to ramp up effective oversight,” said Pinsky, chair of the Senate’s Education, Health and Environmental Affairs Committee. During the 2018 fiscal year, the number of inspections, spot checks and audits conducted by the CAFO program dropped 35% while enforcement actions were down 67%, according to MDE records.

Agency officials blamed the decrease in enforcement partly on an “increased emphasis on inspecting new [CAFO] construction.”

Meanwhile, Holly Porter, head of a group representing the region’s poultry producers, said she interprets the decline in enforcement actions as a sign that farmers are meeting their environmental obligations.

She added that her group, the Delmarva Poultry Industry, supports the fee structure changes despite reservations that it may put Maryland chicken growers at a competitive disadvantage with their peers in Delaware and Virginia.

MDE Secretary Ben Grumbles said the proposed fees conform with the law while providing the resources to continue what he called “one of the best programs of its type in the Chesapeake Bay region.”

He noted that the program receives funding from several sources, including the Maryland Clean Water Fund and a federal grant directed at permitting and monitoring CAFOs.

Grumbles said that Maryland was the first state in the region to win federal approval for an expanded regulatory program covering for animal operations. “It has been highly successful for 10 years now, operating under a budget approved every year by Maryland’s General Assembly,” Grumbles said. ”We look forward to working with all citizens, stakeholders and policymakers to ensure effective implementation of a renewed permit and continued environmental progress.”

Pinsky’s law, which went into effect Oct. 1, dealt with more than CAFO fees. Among other things, it imposes new reporting requirements for animal manure transported as fertilizer to other farms and reinstates regular water-quality monitoring by the Department of Natural Resources at nine sites on the Lower Shore.

MDE is taking public comment on the newly proposed stormwater permit until Dec. 27. The new regulations could go into effect early next year.

By Jeremy Cox

Striped Bass Decline Spurs New Look at Mycobacteria

November 6, 2019 by Bay Journal Leave a Comment

When Wolfgang Vogelbein peered at striped bass sores through a microscope 22 years ago, he knew he was looking at something very different than what was grabbing headlines at the time.

An apparently healthy stripped bass, left, and a suspiciously unhealthy one will have their spleens removed and tested for mycobacteria. (Dave Harp)

Pfiesteria piscicida — the so-called “cell from hell” — was being blamed for fish kills in Maryland and making people sick.

But what Vogelbein saw through his lens wasn’t the result of a harmful algae toxin. It was a nasty bacterial infection, creating ugly sores on the outside of fish and lesions on the inside.

The infections were caused by mycobacteria, a type of bacteria that are widespread in the environment, but not typically associated with problems in wild fish. Suddenly, though, it was turning up in large numbers of the Chesapeake Bay’s most prized finfish.

“I thought I would be spending the rest of my career working on myco,” recalled Vogelbein, a fish pathologist at the Virginia Institute of Marine Science.

It didn’t turn out that way. Mycobacteria never snagged the attention — nor large-scale research funding — as did Pfiesteria. Nor was it associated with high-profile fish kills or considered a human health threat.

Decades later, Pfiesteria has largely vanished from discussion, and some scientists now question whether it was responsible for fish kills at all.

But the mycobacteria problem never went away — and has only gotten worse. The majority of the Bay’s striped bass are infected and, by the time they are 5 years old, nearly all carry the disease. An unknown number are thought to die. “We think it is substantial,” Vogelbein said.

Now, with the striped bass population in trouble, the Bay’s mycobacteria problem may get another look. Striped bass numbers have been declining along the East Coast for a decade and a half, and a recent stock assessment for the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission concluded that the population was being overfished.

The commission, comprised of East Coast fishery managers, at the end of October acted to reduce harvests 18% in the Bay and along the coast beginning next year in response.

But the assessment also raised questions about whether mycobacteria infections may be playing a bigger role in the decline than currently thought, citing studies that suggest even higher rates of mortality among striped bass from the Bay than assumed in the assessment. The study called for a better understanding of the impact the disease might be having in the Bay and coastwide, and flagged it as one of the highest research priorities.

If the disease is having a greater impact than previously thought, it could also mean any new fishing regulations would be less effective than hoped.

“There is likely an impact somewhere,” said Mark Matsche, a fish health scientist with the Maryland Department of Natural Resources. “My question is, what is the severity of the impact to the population?”

A mysterious disease

An enlarged spleen is a sign of a mycobacteria infestation in striped bass. By the time they are 5 years old, 80-90% of the Chesapeake Bay’s striped bass carry the disease. (Dave Harp)

Mycobacteriosis — and what it means for the Bay’s most valuable recreational species — has perplexed scientists and fishery managers since it was first observed in 1997. It is a chronic wasting disease which, in aquaculture, usually results in death, but severe infections typically are not seen in wild fish populations.

Diseases affecting finfish are usually short-lived events, which sometimes result in dramatic fish kills and then disappear. In contrast, the mycobacteria infections in the Bay show no sign of relenting and are likely to take years to kill fish.

“We are not used to seeing this persistent, long-term epizootic which doesn’t seem to go anywhere,” Matsche said. “It is very, very different.”

Further, the two types of mycobacteria causing problems in the Bay — Mycobacterium shottsii and M. psuedoshottsii — were previously unknown. They were only discovered when a researcher at VIMS accidentally left slides with tissue samples from striped bass in an incubator, and colonies of the bacteria began to grow.

No one knows why they seemed to have suddenly appeared and become a problem. In early years after the discovery, only 10–20% of striped bass in the Bay seemed to carry the infection. Today, the majority are infected, and surveys in Maryland and Virginia show that 80–90% of striped bass carry the disease by the time they are 5 years old.

Also unclear is why striped bass are so susceptible. Although the same two mycobacteria species sometimes turn up in other fish, they don’t seem to have the same impact, even in closely related species like white perch.

Nor does the disease seem to be a problem outside the Bay. While there is some anecdotal evidence that infections are seen in other areas, they do not seem as widespread or severe as in the Bay, and it’s unclear whether they are even the same mycobacteria species.

There is also some evidence that the disease may progress more slowly in adult fish after they leave the Chesapeake. That makes scientists suspect there may be some type of stress in the Bay that makes the condition worse — but it’s unclear what that might be.

A rockfish awaits a necropsy. Its spleen will tell whether it has been infested with mycobacteria. (Dave Harp)

Efforts to answer such questions have lagged in recent years. Aside from some support after the initial discovery, research funding largely dried up. The striped bass population, after bottoming out in the 1980s, was thriving by the time mycobacteria infections were discovered.

“Things were so good with striped bass — management was in a great place, anglers were happy and the pressure wasn’t there to deal with a crisis mode,” said Robert Latour, a VIMS fisheries scientist. “It was, ‘How do we enjoy this recovered fishery?’ And there were many other fires for fisheries managers to put out.”

Slow killer with uncertain impacts

The biggest unanswered question is the extent to which the infections are actually killing fish and impacting the striped bass population.

The disease progresses slowly, with the condition of the fish deteriorating over time. Scientists believe many of the infected fish die, but how many and how quickly are difficult to determine.

“We are not seeing thousands of fish washing up on the shoreline,” said David Gauthier of Old Dominion University. “They are probably dropping out of the population a few at a time and getting eaten by crabs, so it is not highly visible. So trying to measure how much mortality there is on a population basis is really difficult.”

An intensive study years ago on the Rappahannock River, in which striped bass were tagged, recaptured and examined over a period of years, concluded the mortality rate of infected fish was double that of uninfected fish.

Still, that’s not the full story. It’s unclear whether the disease shaves a few months, or many years, off the lifespan of an infected striped bass. If it survives long enough to reproduce, the impact of the disease on the overall population might be minimal.

On the other hand, a number of sublethal impacts could also be important. For instance, studies show that infected females tend to mature earlier and are smaller than uninfected fish. Because smaller fish produce fewer eggs than larger ones, the reproductive capacity of the population might be reduced.

Trying to figure out what that means for the overall striped bass population is further complicated because most do not spend their entire lives in the Chesapeake. They are spawned in the Bay, and the young live there for several years. Eventually, most move to the ocean until returning to spawn, though some males never leave the Bay at all.

And while the Chesapeake is thought to be the largest component of the overall coastal population — and the focal point of the disease — it’s unknown just how much of the coastal stock they constitute. It’s also unknown how many males stay in the Bay and how many leave.

“We feel like it is a problem within the Bay for the time that the resident population is here, but sort of casting that into the broader, full coastwide population is a little more murky because of these missing pieces of information,” said VIMS’ Latour.

Modeling the population

The model used in the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission assessment to estimate the size of the striped bass stock lumps the entire population together. If striped bass from the Chesapeake Bay are dying at a faster rate than fish elsewhere, it has no way to precisely account for the difference.

As a result, increased mortality caused by mycobacteria is not directly factored into the stock assessment. Estimates of “natural mortality” — fish that die because of all non-fishing activities — have been adjusted over time for the entire coast, but it’s not known whether they fully capture the impact of the disease.

Complicating the problem is that those estimates are based partly on tagging studies. Each year, biologists along the coast place tags on striped bass, asking that they be returned when those fish are caught, often years later. That helps biologists estimate the ultimate fate of fish.

But return rates for tagged fish have declined since the striped bass population crisis ended decades ago. It’s not totally clear how much of that decline is caused by the loss of fish to disease and how much is from public apathy.

“We don’t know how many of the fish that disappear are dying naturally, and how much is because they are caught and people are seeing them again, but just aren’t telling us,” said Katie Drew, the stock assessment team leader with the ASFMC.

She said the assessment’s overall estimates of total striped bass mortality are probably correct because it matches what is observed in the overall population trend. But it’s possible that the population model underestimates natural mortality and overestimates fishing mortality.

In either case, she said, the remedy is the same — reduce fishing pressure — because managers have no control over the disease. But if disease is responsible for a larger portion of overall mortality than assumed, and fishing causes a smaller portion, efforts to reduce the catch may have less of an impact than hoped.

“You will see some benefit in reducing fishing mortality for sure,” Drew said. “But if natural mortality is a much bigger component of total mortality than we think, it won’t be as big of an effect.”

The commission might get better estimates in the future. It wants to move away from a stock assessment model that lumps the entire striped bass population together and toward one that separates the population by regions —allowing them to better estimate disease-related impacts on fish spawned in the Bay.

Models to do that have yet to pass scientific peer review. But scientists are optimistic they will be ready for the next striped bass assessment in several years.

Trying to answer questions

In the wake of the recent stock assessment, scientists are working to fine-tune what they think they can say about the disease’s impact on striped bass.

“I think people are really eager to get to the bottom of this and to try to better understand what might be causing this particular epizootic in the Bay,” said Genevieve Nesslage a fisheries scientist with the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science.

Nesslage is working with a graduate student to use disease data that the state collects each year, along with environmental and other information, to build a computer model that examines potential population-level impacts of disease- related mortality in the Bay. They also want to try to identify environmental triggers that may worsen its impact on infected fish.

Likewise, Vogelbein, Gauthier and Latour are working to analyze many hundreds of samples from striped bass collected over the last decade that have been preserved but never examined because of a lack of funding. The hope is that a larger, richer set of data will help paint a clearer picture of what’s happening — at least in the Chesapeake.

Because most “deaths” are seen in computer models rather than the real world, that improved understanding will help modelers better predict disease impacts, and mortality, on the population and gain confidence in their results.

“Models are only as good as the data that go into them,” Vogelbein noted.

Scientists generally believe that some stress factors are playing a significant role in making the disease impact worse.

Variables such as increased temperatures, large oxygen-starved dead zones — even increased particulates in the water — have been suggested as factors that speed the decline of infected fish. Some think changes in striped bass diet, related to changes in menhaden abundance, might have reduced their health and made them less resistant to disease.

The renewed focus might shed light on those issues.

While the disease progresses over time, that progression isn’t always steady. Matsche said that some recaptured fish show relatively little change after several years, but some are considerably worse after a single season. “There are a lot of variables at play here that we don’t fully understand,” he said.

If those factors could be understood — and alleviated — it might open another door for management to help the fish.

Does a dead zone equal dead fish?

One prime suspect is the Bay’s poor water quality. During the hot summer, striped bass seek refuge in deeper, cooler water. But if the Bay’s oxygen-starved dead zone makes those areas off limits, it pushes the fish into warmer water that is more stressful — and may make them more vulnerable to disease progression.

A laboratory study several years ago by scientists at VIMS showed that when infected fish were exposed to both low dissolved oxygen and higher temperatures, they appeared fatigued and were likely less able to elude predators or pursue prey fish to eat.

Jim Gartland, an assistant research scientist at VIMS, has observed this in the wild as well. Gartland, who helps conduct a fish survey along the entire length of the Bay each year, said striped bass in midsummer heat appear especially stressed near areas of low oxygen water.

“When you are in the dead zone area, you will see them just easing along the surface sometimes,” Gartland said. “And striped bass usually don’t do that.”

If such a correlation between environmental conditions and disease exists, it could offer both hope — and peril — for striped bass.

While there may be little that can be done about the disease itself, such work could suggest that some actions — such as accelerating nutrient reduction efforts aimed at eliminating the dead zone — might reduce disease impact on striped bass.

On the other hand, Bay water temperatures are already warming, and if that trend continues, it could stress striped bass even more and make oxygen conditions worse.

“This level of a significant pathogen in a population is kind of ominous,” Gauthier said. “It is possible they are holding their own against it right now, but what is going to happen? They are already sort of at the edge of their thermal limit down here. What is going to happen in the future if the environment keeps changing?”

After two decades of wondering, scientists hope a resurgence in interest will help shed light on those questions.

By Karl Blankenship

Coalition to Think Beyond State Borders to Offset Conowingo Flows

October 30, 2019 by Bay Journal Leave a Comment

A coalition of nonprofits is developing a plan to reduce nutrient and sediment pollution that now flows over the Conowingo Dam. (Dave Harp)

Write and enact a plan to eliminate millions of pounds of nutrient pollution washing into waterways.
Do it without duplicating the pollution reduction plans that states will be using to meet their own goals, which typically contain the cheapest and potentially most effective options.
Oh, and come up with a way to pay for it, too.

Surprisingly, people have signed up for this seemingly impossible job. A coalition of nonprofits is developing a plan to reduce nutrient pollution to the Upper Bay to offset the impact of the Conowingo Dam — and to pay for it.

They hope to identify highly effective ways to reduce agricultural and stormwater runoff, which carries nutrients into waterways, and use them in places not already being targeted by states for Bay cleanup efforts. They also aim to tap new funding sources, including the private sector, to help pay for the plan.

“It is certainly a challenge,” said Byran Seipp, a watershed manager with the Center for Watershed Protection who is helping to coordinate the effort. “There is no doubt about that. It is something people have been wrestling with for quite a long time.”

The 94-foot-high Conowingo Dam, located just 10 miles up the Susquehanna River from the Chesapeake, has been casting a shadow over Bay cleanup efforts for years. Scientists had long known that once its 14-mile-long reservoir was filled, it would no long trap pollutants and they would begin to flow downstream.

But that day of reckoning was thought to be far in the future — at least past the 2025 Bay cleanup goal. As a result, impacts from the filled reservoir were not factored in when the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency assigned nutrient reduction goals to states in 2010.

Recent studies, though, determined that the reservoir has filled and is spilling more nutrients — nitrogen and phosphorus — into the Chesapeake than previously thought.

Computer models estimate that an additional 6 million pounds of nitrogen and 260,000 pounds of phosphorus would need to be controlled to make up for the dam’s lost trapping capacity. That would require roughly 15% more nutrient reductions beyond the stated 2025 cleanup goals — more than some states in the region have to accomplish individually.

With states already struggling to meet those goals, the state-federal Bay Program partnership last year decided to seek proposals from outside parties to develop a strategy to make up that gap.

Proposals were collected earlier this year, and the EPA recently awarded grants totaling nearly $600,000 to the Center for Watershed Protection, Chesapeake Bay Trust and Chesapeake Conservancy to tackle the job. They, in turn, will enlist the support of nearly a dozen other nonprofits, university partners and private sector consultants.

They’ll be working in partnership with a steering committee of state and federal representatives to coordinate the effort and ensure that their plan does not rely on practices states are counting on to meet their own cleanup goals.

The hope is that the Conowingo group will bring new insights that help tackle problems where progress has been elusive.

While the region has succeeded in reducing nutrient pollution from wastewater treatment plants, which can be addressed through regulation and technology, it has struggled to reduce nutrient-laden runoff from farms and developed lands. Progress remains far off the pace required to meet Bay water quality goals.

The Conowingo team will look to new high tech tools, new ideas and new financing strategies to accelerate progress.

“There is a real opportunity to create a sort of case study of how these states can come together to solve these basinwide issues in a cost-effective way,” Seipp said.

One of the first tasks is determining, geographically, the best places for making additional nutrient reductions. While the dam is located on the Susquehanna, reductions from nearby areas of Maryland’s Eastern and Western shores would have similar impacts on Bay water quality. The group is working with computer modelers to more precisely identify those areas.

The ability to explore that type of question is one reason that this plan will be unique. Unlike states, which are constrained to reducing nutrients within their borders, the Conowingo team can make reductions across jurisdictional borders.

Once those regions are identified, the team will use high-resolution satellite data and other tools to identify more precisely specific sites where runoff control practices will have the greatest benefit to water quality.

Many state and federal cost-share programs tend to rely on farmers signing up on their own to participate. By identifying specific sites, or groups of farms, they envision using more proactive outreach to targeted groups of farmers and other landowners, based on priority locations.

“It is not working an acre here and acre there,” said Jeff Allenby, director of conservation technology with the Chesapeake Conservancy. “You can actually put together some significant initiatives that achieve larger results than they would if you were just working project by project.”

The team also will explore barriers, whether financial, technical or cultural, to different nutrient reduction techniques. Some stream restorations, for example, meet resistance from landowners or local governments because the work requires more land than they are willing to make available or can acquire. The new tools can help identify opportunities for such projects that require less land.

Allenby said the group also might identify effective but underused manure treatment technologies to try to figure out how to boost their adoption.

Ultimately, though, the effort will require more money.

Some could come from Exelon, the utility that owns the dam. The state of Maryland recently announced an agreement with Exelon, in which the company will pay $200 million toward pollution reduction and habitat improvements over the next 50 years.

Even so, the Conowingo plan will require more money and creative ways to find it. A group of financial advisers will be recommending ideas, including private sector involvement.

One possibility is to view some agricultural efforts as infrastructure projects, and fund them through bonds. That would bring money to address problems more quickly, but allow those improvements to be paid off over time.

Also, the plan will likely involve the use of nutrient “trading,” and other market-based tools that encourage private investors to install nutrient control practices for credits that can be sold to jurisdictions or businesses needing to offset pollution impacts in other places. And that needs to happen across state borders, said Dan Nees of the University of Maryland Center for Global Sustainability.

“Somehow, we have to agree that geopolitical boundaries are not going to work when it comes to finance,” Nees said. “There needs to be an opportunity for revenue to flow back and forth where it has the greatest economic value, and that is through markets and water quality trading.”

Such techniques have been talked about for years in the Bay region, but have never had widespread adoption. Because of its cross-border approach, Nees said the Conowingo plan is ideally suited to pilot such concepts.

“We’ve been talking about this for too long,” Nees said. “We have to actually do it.”

A draft strategy is expected by March, with a final plan in June.

There is one key difference between the Conowingo cleanup plan and those written by the states. The EPA can take action against the states if their plans fall short, because they are legally required to meet Bay water quality standards. There’s no such legal requirement for the groups working on the Conowingo plan.

“We are working toward being able to devise a plan and have the funding to implement it and the tools to track it,” Seipp said. “But if that doesn’t happen, the people who ultimately hold the regulatory responsibility is the states.”

Warmer Temperatures Could Have Chilling Effect on Fall Foliage

October 25, 2019 by Bay Journal Leave a Comment

Autumn leaf peepers in Chesapeake Bay states may be disappointed by more muted colors because of climate change, scientists say.A study says the effects of climate change may lead to more muted autumn foliage colors for leaf peepers. (Ad Crable)

“Dull falls” may be added to the string of detriments climate change may bring, according to a 2018 report by the Pennsylvania Department of Conservation and Natural Resources. “Climate change is disrupting the timing of natural cycles, such as trees’ emergence from dormancy, leaf development and blooming,” the agency said in a recent statement highlighting the problem.

“It can get very complicated, and it can have negative impacts to the vibrancy of the foliage,” added Kerry Campbell, environmental manager for the state’s Department of Environmental Protection energy office.

Leaf color is affected by an interplay of conditions, including excess rainfall or drought, high or low temperatures and frost. Climate change is expected to have an influence on all of them. Among the changing conditions that could lead to a fall foliage letdown: a dry, hot summer caused by rising temperatures and disrupted rainfall patterns that can result in browning or early leaf drop.

Climate change also is expected to make conditions more hospitable for diseases and invasive insects, which can further stress trees and lead to more muted colors.

Also, scientists are predicting that the dominate range of some tree species will move northward to escape warming temperatures. Among the likely candidates are sugar maples, which provide one of the most brilliant autumn displays.

“In ecology, everything is connected,” said Chris Firestone, a plant botanist with DCNR. “Climate change can impact small things that we don’t think about, and we don’t always know how those things may play out.”

By Ad Crable
Bay Journal

Bay Scientists Studying Environmental, Economic Uses for Hemp

October 22, 2019 by Bay Journal Leave a Comment

Christopher Harnish, left, and his brother, Bryan Harnish, both of Lancaster County, PA, examine their first-year crop of hemp plants, which can grow to 20-feet tall. (Dave Harp)

A Gold Rush mentality has erupted across Chesapeake Bay states as the lacy fan-shaped leaves of more than 50,000 acres of industrial hemp spring from the landscape for the first time since World War II. Bay states and the federal government are removing barriers to growing the misunderstood plant, which was a staple crop from Colonial times and then banned for little more than its likeness to a mind-altering cousin, marijuana.

Now, hemp is again being embraced amid bold claims that include a possible economic life preserver for struggling farmers and an environmentally friendly cash crop that could help reduce nutrient pollution in the Bay. Nearly 2,800 farmers and entrepreneurs had hemp in the ground this summer in Virginia, Pennsylvania, Maryland, West Virginia and New York.

Hemp backers are convinced that the plant is a sustainable alternative to plastics, cotton and fossil fuels, touting the possibility of more than 25,000 natural products that range from plant-based concrete and pain-salving lotions to animal feed and biofuel.

But much is still unknown about hemp’s future economic and environmental impact. In the Bay watershed, scientific research is under way to determine if high-quality hemp can even be grown in the region’s climate and soils and to learn whether it is indeed a miracle plant that offers all of the Earth-friendly benefits and human health claims promoted by supporters.

Advocates say that the plant stores more carbon than it needs to grow, which makes it a possible tool for fighting climate change. Early research also suggests the plant is better than mainstream crops in sucking up phosphorus from manure and poultry litter spread on fields before it can wash off and pollute local waterways.

Hemp grows fast, tall and thick, outcompeting weeds and reducing the need for herbicides, proponents boast. In Pennsylvania, it is being planted on abandoned strip mines to see if it can take root in the depleted soil. Minnesota has a state-run pilot project studying hemp as a mass-produced alternative to corn and soybeans to improve water quality.

Because it grows fast and profuse with a robust root system, hemp may make an excellent streamside buffer to stabilize banks and catch manure and soil runoff, some have claimed.

Samuel Fisher, an Amish farmer in Chester County, PA, walks among the rows of his first hemp crop. (Dave Harp)

But some studying hemp aren’t seeing it as an environmental panacea for the Bay states.

Ryan Davis of the Alliance for the Chesapeake Bay said that the group took a look at hemp for riparian buffers but rejected it because hemp is a seasonal crop and dies back in winter. Also, a monoculture of one plant is not good for an ecosystem, he said.

“I have concerns about the crop itself. The mid-Atlantic is a tough place [to grow hemp] because of the weather and climate. We have a lot of humidity and warm evenings that promote disease,” said Andrew Ristvey, an Extension specialist for commercial horticulture with the University of Maryland.

Ristvey added that he is encouraged by research showing that hemp grown for fiber may remove phosphorus, a type of nutrient, from the soil. But whether hemp proves to be a better plant for the environment in Bay states will depend on the amount of fertilizer and chemicals needed to grow quality plants. For now, those are unanswered questions.

And, because hemp grows around the same time as mainstream crops such as corn and soybeans, it cannot be used as a winter cover crop to help reduce nutrient runoff.

As for needing fewer pesticides, Eric Williams, a spokeswoman for the Virginia Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services, noted that when hemp is grown for its flowers and CBD oil, which constitutes the great majority of plantings so far, plants are spaced farther apart and weed growth can be a problem.

Samuel Fisher, a Plain Sect farmer in Chester County, PA, who is growing hemp for its flowers as a source of CBD oil, said his experience so far shows that the crop needs plenty of nutrients from fertilizer. Insects have not proven a problem but threats of fungus and bacteria have been.

“For dairy farmers who are struggling, it could either keep them in business or put them out of business very quickly,” Fisher said. “You can’t just plant it in a field and pretend it’s going to grow and come out two months later to harvest it. We have two to three people in the field every day.”

“I think we’re going to quickly learn that it’s like a lot of crops we deal with. Insect and disease pressure will be prevalent,” added Lancaster County hemp farmer, Christopher Harnish, who is growing a little more than 3 acres in a field used last year for corn.

Dr. John Fike, a Virginia Tech associate professor of crop and soil environmental sciences who has researched the plant, said there are a number of “hemp mythologies.”

He said claims of reduced pests and less fertilizer needed are simply not true.

Referring to studies on growing hemp on compromised land to clean up the soil, such as polluted industrial sites and strip mines, he said, “You can grow it on marginal land but you get a marginal crop.”

He said hemp can be grown with no-till farming methods but that herbicides are needed to control weeds.

Some have expressed concerns that if hemp becomes a profitable cash crop that farmers and landowners will pull out of government conservation programs that set aside farmland for streamside buffers and instead plow the land for hemp.

But officials in Bay states say that is not happening, at least not so far. Most hemp is being grown in former tobacco and alfalfa fields and other areas already in production.

“No one is clearcutting wooded acres for hemp,” said Shannon Powers, spokeswoman for the Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture.

The hemp boom comes at the same time that the region’s dairy and tobacco farmers are reeling from low prices, tariffs and falling demand. Though they are a savvy and conservative bunch, some can’t help but hope that the arrival of hemp is a fortuitous blessing.

“I’ve had more than one dairy farmer say ‘I’m going to grow this stuff to try to save my dairy operation,’ ” Fike said.

But it’s too early to predict how much of a lifeline hemp might be for farmers.

Markets and processing facilities for most of hemp’s projected uses, especially the line of products derived from fiber and seeds, have not emerged on a wide scale yet. Research is still taking place to determine which varieties can be grown in Bay states and how successfully.

And everyone is still waiting to see how the federal government will regulate hemp, now that it is no longer considered a dangerous, controlled substance. To date, the federal Food and Drug Administration hasn’t approved the use of any pesticides to treat hemp or decided which CBD health claims can be verified. And while the 2018 federal Farm Bill made hemp eligible for crop insurance, the guidelines have yet to be put in place.

Skittish ag-lending banks are not yet handing out loans for harvesting and processing equipment.

Most of the growers in the Bay states are experimenting with hemp on only a few acres. When and if hemp takes off, will farmers in the region be able to compete with 500-acre spreads in the Pacific Northwest where the industry has a head start by years?

“There’s just an awful lot of unknowns,” Fike stressed. “Will this be a flash in the pan or the next big thing or just another crop? That remains to be seen.”

Even hemp cheerleader Erica Stark, chair of the National Hemp Association, advised caution, though she sees hemp’s future footprint as huge. “Certainly, we love the enthusiasm out there and we want to get everybody excited, but we also need to be realistic. It’s not going to happen overnight.”

Ristvey offers his own prediction. “It won’t be a magic bullet. I suspect it will be just one of those crops that will add to the palette of agriculture that we have in the United States.”
Hemp Cultivation in the Bay Region (Data provided by the state agricultural agencies)

Maryland

847 growers, 161 processors, 36 dealers
8,500 acres of hemp cultivation permitted
2019 is the first year Maryland has allowed cultivating hemp for commercial use.
Many growers are struggling tobacco farmers.

New York

490 growers, 118 processors
19,932 acres of hemp cultivation permitted
The state is spending $10 million on research and economic development.
June 2019 legislation gives farmers the first chance at permits to grow commercial hemp.

Pennsylvania

324 growers at 828 locations
Struggling dairy farmers and Plain Sect farmers who embrace labor-intensive crops hold a significant number of permits.

Virginia

955 growers, 191 processors, 55 dealers
10,000 acres of hemp cultivation permitted
The cultivation of hemp for commercial use was approved in March 2019.
The biggest concentration of growers are tobacco farmers hit hard by declining sales and tariffs imposed by China.

West Virginia

158 growers
2,531 acres of hemp cultivation permitted
Hemp licenses tripled in 2019, the second year hemp was allowed to be grown commercially.

Potential Uses for Industrial Hemp

Advocates of hemp say there are more than 25,000 possible uses of industrial hemp beyond the current considerable and growing CBD oil market. Here are some most likely to see a market.

Hemp CBD oil can be used to treat a variety of ills including anxiety, inflammation, chronic joint pain, epilepsy, headaches and sleep disorders.
Hemp seeds and oils can be used for cooking oil, baking flour, yogurt, beer, snacks and high-protein animal feed for pets and livestock.
Hemp fiber is similar to but lighter than plastics for packaging. The automobile industry is exploring products such as dashboards, door panels and mirror frames to reduce plastics and install a lighter material that could improve gas mileage.
Hemp fiber can be used for clothing, animal bedding, kitty litter and to absorb oil.
Hemp fiber is used as a core for insulation, paneling and home building blocks. It is being sold as Hempcrete.
Fast-growing and tall hemp can be planted in streamside buffers.
Hemp is touted as a biofuel.
Heating hemp plants produces a soil amendment known as biochar that absorbs water and stores greenhouse gases.

Can Bacteria Help Restore the Chesapeake Bay’s Oysters?

October 21, 2019 by Bay Journal Leave a Comment

Ryan Hoover teaches sculpture making at the Maryland Institute College of Art. So, why is he developing a product that could help oysters grow in the Chesapeake Bay?

“That’s a fine question,” he said, laughing.

The answer is that he prefers to make art that has a function. In this case, he’s using new technology to build better artificial reefs for oysters — with an assist from nature itself.

The Chesapeake’s oyster population is believed to be at approximately 1% of its historic abundance. Scientists say habitat loss is partly to blame. In many places, dredging has reduced oyster beds to thin, half-buried sheets of dead shells that offer little support for new generations of bivalves.

Restoring oyster reefs is one of the top goals of the multistate and federal Bay cleanup program. Oyster shells are widely believed to be the best perch for attracting and growing young oysters, but it’s hard to find enough shells — dead or alive — to use for restoration. Fishery managers have substituted other materials, such as granite, with mixed success.

Hoover is collaborating with the University Maryland Center for Environmental Science on developing a cement-like substance that, they hope, will provide growing strata for oysters and approach the productivity of natural reefs.

Well, UMCES is only one of his collaborators. The other is a common type of bacteria that doesn’t cause disease and lives in the soil.

When mixed with nutrients, Sporosarcina pasteurii spits out calcium carbonate crystals, one of the main ingredients in oyster shells. Hoover and his team combine this mixture with sand. The crystals grow to fill the space between the grains, binding them together.

The result is sandstone-like material known as biocement.

The project puts the team at the front lines of a field still in its infancy. Biofabrication, as it’s called, harnesses biological organisms to make new products.

Hoover describes the process this way: In manufacturing, humans start with something nature has made, cut it up into smaller pieces and reassemble it into a product. One example: sawing a tree into boards and putting them together to form a chair. Biofabrication revolutionizes that process.

“What if we could take the tree cells and assemble those into the shape of a chair?” Hoover asked.

The field has made headlines for promising advancements in medicine, such as efforts to make organs with 3D printers.

Several universities and startups across the country have been racing in recent years to develop and manufacture products with biocement on a large scale.

Possible applications, backers said, include using it to harden important historic buildings, store carbon underground and make a grout that shores up soils in earthquake-prone areas. One of the uses closest to being realized involves a North Carolina company working with the U.S. Air Force to build aircraft runways in out-of-the-way places where traditional construction is unwieldy.

Hoover is no newcomer to biofabrication. He developed a biofabrication lab at MICA a few years ago, where he and students have developed a range of uses, from colorful petri dish art to vegan wool.

The lack of natural shells for restoring reefs has been an ongoing challenge in the Chesapeake. In Maryland, efforts to dredge buried shell have been greeted by criticism from anglers and environmentalists, who say the practice destroys valuable fish habitat. Restaurants and seafood businesses have partnered to conserve and reuse shells. But the total returned to the Bay hasn’t been nearly enough to offset the shells lost to harvest and ensure a ready supply for restoration sites.

Fishery managers have turned to shell alternatives, such as concrete, granite and even porcelain toilets. But young oysters, known as spat or larvae, generally have had greater trouble latching onto the artificial materials. They also tend to grow at a slower rate.

Because biocement consists of some of the same ingredients as natural shell, Matthew Gray, Hoover’s partner at UMCES, thinks spat will be more apt to settle on it and grow compared with other artificial alternatives.

“Larvae are particular about what they want to settle on,” said Gray, an oyster researcher at the center’s Horn Point Laboratory near Cambridge.

Since biocement eventually dissolves when exposed to water, Gray and Hoover hope it proves more palatable to watermen and boaters, who have voiced concerns for years that concrete and other types of artificial reefs posing permanent navigational hazards.

“Nobody is really excited about dumping a bunch of concrete in the Bay,” Hoover said. “It’s essentially there forever.”

It’s also important to consider the environmental impacts of concrete production, he said. Worldwide, manufacturing concrete generates about 8% of all carbon dioxide emissions, studies show. Biocement doesn’t have that problem, Hoover added.

Hoover said his interest in biofabrication grew out of taking a class at the Baltimore Underground Science Space, a nonprofit makerspace for synthetic biology. An UMCES graduate student sat in on a biofrabrication lecture by Hoover and later introduced him to Gray.

“When I talked to Ryan he was like, ‘Oh, I think I could make oyster shells, if that would be useful,’” Gray recalled.

They started working together in January 2018, at first trying to reproduce a whole oyster shell in biocement form. Hoover initially forged the proper oblong shape of an oyster with a 3D printer, but it lacked the subtle ridges and other surface details of an authentic bivalve. So, they switched to growing the material in silicone-rubber molds. It takes anywhere from four days to 1 ½ weeks for the bacteria-sand mixture to grow to full size, Hoover said, adding that he hopes to find efficiencies to accelerate the process.

Then, it was Gray’s turn to test their creation with live larvae in a lab. The results were promising. More baby oysters attached themselves to natural shells than on the biocement, but his work showed that biocement was significantly more successful than the third material, granite. He counted just 15 larvae on granite versus nearly 200 on biocement.

Why the difference? Gray speculates that the presence of carbonate in the biocement and natural shells may be a cue to young oysters that they’ve found a suitable place to settle. The carbonate also may affect the water chemistry, giving oysters a better chance at success.

Gray and Hoover aren’t alone in putting bacteria to work to create oyster reefs.

Biomason, the company with the Air Force runway contract, applied last year for a patent on a technology in which the S. pasteurii bacteria transform fabric, such as burlap, into a hard strata for the bivalves. The method allows the strata to be formed into virtually any desired shape before it hardens, according to patent documents.

As for the Maryland project, several questions remain unanswered. What is the best way to grow and shape the biocement? What factors influence the larvae attachment to the material? How does it perform in the real world? And how much will it cost to make?

Molding biocement to mimic individual oysters may not be the best method going forward, Gray said. To provide more surface area for the floating larvae to find, he envisions forming it into veneers that attach to “oyster castles,” the artificial reefs typically made from individual blocks of recycle shell and concrete. An entirely biocement oyster castle could be time-consuming to make and potentially costly.

He would like to get environmental bang for the buck by collecting the nutrients needed for the carbonate creation from sewage treatment plants.

But that’s well into the future. For now, Gray and Hoover are trying to gather funding. They have applied for $140,000 from Maryland Sea Grant, which would cover two years of research. They expect to hear whether they received it this fall.

Their application included a letter of support from the Chesapeake Bay Foundation. Biocement offers a flexible design that could make it suitable for restoration at both public harvest grounds and at sanctuaries undergoing restoration, said Allison Colden, the group’s Maryland fisheries scientist.

“We believe the study would provide ‘proof of concept’ for an approach that would address one of the biggest limiting factors to oyster recovery in Chesapeake Bay and could improve our own restoration program,” she said in the letter.

In a way, biocement and other types of synthetic biology represent a shift in thinking about humanity’s relationship with nature, Hoover said. Most of recorded history has seen an “extractive relationship” between the two, but it could become more symbiotic in the future.

“What if we collaborate with these bacteria to restore these oysters?” he asked. “It’s sort of a multi-genus collaboration here.”

By Jeremy Cox
Bay Journal

Low Salinity Wallops Oysters in Chesapeake

October 9, 2019 by Bay Journal Leave a Comment

The rains have finally let up, but they’ve dealt a serious blow to the Chesapeake Bay’s oysters — and to the people who make a living harvesting, cultivating or restoring them.

Scott Budden, foreground, along with Sean Corcoran, center, and Sam Saviertka, all with the Orchard Point Oyster Company, cull oysters for market on Shipping Creek near Stevensville, MD. (Dave Harp)

Oysters need at least a little salt in their environment to live and a bit more to thrive. The record-setting downpours that began last year and continued through the first half of this year flushed so much freshwater into the Chesapeake that salinity sank to abnormally low levels.

In some places in Maryland and on the Potomac River, where the water turned almost completely fresh for months on end, oysters died in droves. Those that survived elsewhere didn’t grow much, and reproduction was spotty.

“What a rough beast of a year that was,” said Martin Gary, executive secretary of the Potomac River Fisheries Commission. “Everybody got hammered by it.”

The condition of the Bay’s oysters matters economically, ecologically and culturally. They’re a money maker for the region’s seafood industry. They’re important water filterers, and the reefs they build provide habitat for fish and other Bay creatures. And, they’re part of the traditional fabric of life around the Bay, a staple at many family, church and community feasts in fall and winter.

Now, with commercial harvests of wild oysters down in both Maryland and Virginia, watermen in the two states face new catch restrictions this fall, imposed at least partly to give the beleaguered bivalves a chance to recover from their freshwater woes.

Oyster farmers, meanwhile, are bracing for another off year, after seeing a dip in production in 2018 — breaking what had been steady growth in each of the two states’ aquaculture industries.

And government agencies and environmental nonprofits had to delay or scale back oyster restoration work, as low salinity disrupted the supply of hatchery-bred oyster larvae for seeding rebuilt reefs.

Hatchery hiccups

Oysters are like Goldilocks when it comes to salt — they don’t like too much, or too little. They’re happiest in brackish to moderately salty water, with salinity ranging from 10 to 28 parts per thousand.

But oysters don’t reproduce well or grow much if salinity drops below that floor. And they can die if it stays under 5 ppt for weeks or months at a time.

At Stingray Point near Deltaville, VA, salinity was 8 ppt in March, half of what’s normal that time of year. Up the Bay, where the water tends to be fresher, salinities dropped to deadly levels late last year and stayed that way well into the spring.

Hatcheries, which draw local water to spawn oysters in captivity for use in aquaculture and ecological restoration, struggled to produce larvae or get them to survive long enough to settle on shells as “spat” or “seed.”

No hatchery had more trouble than the one run by the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science at its Horn Point laboratory near Cambridge. The facility, one of the largest on the East Coast, produced a record 1.8 billion spat in both 2016 and 2017.

But this year, persistently low salinity in the Choptank River delayed spawning until August, said Stephanie Tobash Alexander, who manages the operation. As a result, Horn Point only managed to produce about 10% of its usual output.

“That’s science for you,” Alexander said. “We made the most of what we could.”

She hopes next year will return to normal. By late September, the salinity had risen to 12 ppt but it was too late to help this year’s class much. The facility spawned its last oysters of the season on Sept. 18.

The hatchery woes at Horn Point and other private facilities around the Bay had a ripple effect for aquaculture, oyster restoration and even the public fishery.

Spat on oyster shells were loaded in mid-September at the Horn Point Lab oyster hatchery in Cambridge, MD, destined for the sanctuary on the Tred Avon River. Hatchery problems, attributed to low salinity, delayed restoration plantings. (Dave Harp)

“People didn’t get seed as early as they wanted to get seed. In some cases, they didn’t get as much seed as they wanted to get,” said Mike Oesterling, executive director of the Shellfish Growers of Virginia. “So that puts everyone a little behind.”

Oyster farmers scramble

Oyster farmers in both states felt the impact. In Virginia, the top producer of oysters on the East Coast, the harvest from aquaculture was down by one third, to 248,347 bushels, according to preliminary figures from the Virginia Marine Resources Commission. Growers surveyed by the Virginia Institute of Marine Sciences reported that heavy rains and unusually low salinities were impacting their oyster plantings and sales.

Maryland’s smaller oyster farming industry grappled with even lower salinities. Growers there managed to produce just 57,543 bushels last year, down 22% from 2017, according to the state Department of Natural Resources. That was the first drop in production seen since Maryland revamped its shellfish leasing laws around 2010 to revive aquaculture. Until then, the industry’s output had been growing so steadily that it was on track to overtake the state’s fading wild harvest.

Robert T. Brown, Sr., president of the Maryland Watermen’s Association and an oyster farmer himself, said he lost close to 95% of the market-size oysters he had growing on leased bottom in the Potomac, where salinities dropped below 5 ppt in the spring. Closer to the river’s mouth, where salinities were a little higher, mortality was around 35%, he said.

The small, young oysters weathered the freshet better, he said, with only about 5% dying.

“They didn’t grow, but they didn’t die,” he said. They started growing again in August, he noted, as the salinity levels rebounded. But he doesn’t expect many to reach marketable size until sometime next year.

In Virginia, the Bay’s salinity is generally high enough that oysters reproduce well in the wild. Growers there only have to put down shell before spawning begins in late spring to catch freshly hatched larvae. But in Maryland, conditions are less favorable, and many oyster farmers get their spat from hatcheries, often the one at Horn Point. But its troubles this year forced many growers to approach other, private hatcheries, with limited success.

Some had to do even more. Scott Budden’s Orchard Point Oyster Co. raises bivalves in the Chester River, where salinities aren’t that high even in normal years. Early this year, as rains kept coming down, he saw salt concentrations dropping into the danger zone.

“I’d never seen salinity levels that low in winter,” he recalled.

Some of his oysters in the Chester died, but Budden tried to save as many as he could. He pulled 500 bags of oysters out of the river and hauled them by boat and trailer — 40-plus road miles — to another leased area off Eastern Bay. The slightly higher salinity levels there gave the bivalves “a shot in the arm.”

By late spring, as rains began to ease, salinity started creeping back up, and he and his crew moved the oysters back to the Chester. But Budden continues to use Eastern Bay as a place to grow out oysters just before taking them to market.

Restoration setbacks

The hatchery hiccup also set back oyster restoration efforts in Maryland, which with Virginia has pledged to rebuild the bivalve populations and habitat in five tributaries in each state by 2025. Virginia generally counts on natural reproduction to stock the reefs it has built or expanded, but in Maryland, federal and state agencies depend on Horn Point to for larvae or spat on shell.

Officials had at one point planned to plant spat this year in all five of the Maryland tributaries targeted for large-scale restoration. The Little Choptank and Tred Avon rivers need a final round of seeding to finish up projects that began three to four years ago. Harris Creek, though essentially completed in 2015, was in line for some light overseeding of thin spots. Officials even hoped to begin plantings in the St. Mary’s and Manokin rivers, where restoration plans are still being fleshed out.

Much of that work got scaled back or shelved until next year. So did Marylanders Grow Oysters, the popular program under which about 1,500 waterfront property owners voluntarily raise young oysters in cages from their piers for planting in sanctuaries.

“Most of the sanctuary spat are typically produced in the first half of the hatchery season,” explained Chris Judy, the Maryland Department of Natural Resources shellfish program manager, “but this was when the hatchery had zero production.”

The Chesapeake Bay Foundation had hoped to contribute to the effort by producing 25 million spat on shell, said senior scientist Doug Myers. Four-fifths of that was to go on the Maryland sanctuary reefs, under a $3 million, three-year grant from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The other 5 million spat were planned for CBF’s oyster gardening and other initiatives.

CBF normally buys oyster larvae from the Horn Point hatchery and sets them on shell or reef balls at a facility in Southern Maryland. The problems at Horn Point left CBF 13 million spat shy of its goal, Myers said, despite scrambling around to find other sources of larvae.

“It’s been a rough year,” said Stephanie Westby, NOAA’s oyster restoration program manager. “But you know, with climate change, these kind of extreme weather episodes may be the new normal, unfortunately.”

Faltering fisheries

Public fisheries in Maryland and Virginia also suffered.

In Maryland, the DNR works with local watermen’s committees to replenish reefs thinned by harvest. But Horn Point’s problems reduced the amount of hatchery-spawned juvenile bivalves available. Nearly 49 million spat got planted on 48 acres, about a third less than last year, according to the DNR’s Judy.

Meanwhile, salinities north of the Bay Bridge and upriver in major tributaries declined to the point that shellfish in the water grew very little — or died.

In the Potomac River, the extended freshet devastated a promising experiment in rotational harvesting, said Martin Gary of the Potomac River Fisheries Commission. Since 2013, watermen had been planting juvenile oysters annually on reefs or bars above Cobb Island, he said, with plans to harvest them in three years and then every four years afterward.

Virtually all of the bivalves planted there got “crushed,” as Gary put it. The Maryland Department of Natural Resources’ annual survey of oyster reefs in the fall of 2018 found more than 90% of the oysters in that area of the river had died.

Gary said he’s waiting for the DNR survey crew to return in October to find out if any of the oysters there are still alive.

Downriver, near the Potomac’s mouth, low salinity inhibited the oysters’ growth but didn’t kill them.

“We were thankful that we didn’t lose any down there,” Gary said.

Farther south in Virginia, reef surveys found that many oysters didn’t grow much over the last year, either, and some in deeper water had died.

Last season’s wild harvest was the state’s smallest since 2012–13, with just 209,032 bushels landed, according to preliminary data gathered by the Virginia Marine Resources Commission.

Hoping to give Virginia’s oysters a chance to recover, the commission took steps in August to scale back harvests a bit.

The public fishery season traditionally opens Oct. 1, and that’s when watermen using hand or patent tongs can start plucking oysters from the bottom. But the commission delayed until November when watermen can work reefs over with dredges or mechanized hand-scrapes.

The delay gives the oysters more time to reach the 3-inch minimum marketable size, officials explained.

Virginia’s new harvest rules also require that dredge boats stop working by noon on two out of the four months when they’re allowed on the water. Last year’s season allowed them to continue until 2 p.m.

“Generally,” said Andrew Button, who oversees the state agency’s conservation efforts, “it’s a more resource-conservative season.”

Most watermen seemed resigned to the restrictions, but some complained it was unfair to cut back on only certain types of harvest gear.

“If we’re in that bad of shape with the oysters, let’s just shut it all down in October,” said Charles DeMarino, a waterman based out of Cape Charles on the Eastern Shore.

New restrictions took effect this fall in Maryland as well, mainly in response to a study last year that found a long-term decline in the fishery, with most areas being overharvested.

The DNR reduced from five to four the number of weekdays when oysters could be harvested throughout the season, which ends March 31. The agency also scaled back the daily maximum number of bushels that could be harvested by 20% to 33%, depending on the type of gear used.

The limits were aimed at making the fishery sustainable in eight to 10 years, but the freshwater woes figured explicitly into at least one rule change.

The DNR temporarily barred harvests in several places around the Bay, including much of the area north of the Bay Bridge, where few oysters survived the freshet.

The DNR projected that its package of restrictions could reduce the harvest by as much as 26%. Last season’s harvest of 137,000 bushels was already down 25% from the 2017–2018 catch.

The Chesapeake Bay Foundation expressed skepticism about the efficacy of the restrictions. The environmental group had urged tighter limits and pointed to the DNR’s own analysis, which found that reducing the harvest by one day a week would have “little conservation value.”

Just one in four watermen harvest oysters five days a week at the start of the season, according to a DNR presentation, while by the end of the season only 5–10% do.

But, watermen say they’re expecting a leaner harvest from the DNR rules, and that the minority who work the water full-time may feel the pinch more than the part-timers.

“The majority recognized some belt tightening was going to be needed,” said Jim Mullin, executive director of the Maryland Oystermen Association, “especially after the tremendous amount of freshwater events of last year that set the Bay and restoration activities back severely.”

Still, Mullin and other watermen say they’re frustrated by the emphasis on curtailing harvests instead of doing what they contend could help sustain or improve the fishery. They have pushed for reopening some of Maryland’s 51 oyster sanctuaries to rotational harvest and for replenishing worn-down harvest reefs with large quantities of old shell dredged from the Bay bottom. Environmentalists have opposed such moves, arguing that by themselves they won’t make the fishery sustainable long-term.

Meanwhile, with oysters still reeling from the prolonged surge of freshwater, the seafood industry in both ends of the Bay is preparing for another gloomy year.

“We’re not going to have as many market oysters this year,” said Tommy Kellum of W. E. Kellum Seafood in Weems, VA. “It’s a Mother Nature event. It’s not like an occurrence we could have prevented or managed for.”

But most say they think that with a little more “normal” — meaning drier — weather, the Bay’s oysters will rebound, along with aquaculture, restoration and perhaps even the fishery.

“Long term, this is just a bump in the road,” said Stephan Abel, executive director of the Oyster Recovery Partnership, a Maryland nonprofit that works on restoration with state and federal agencies and other nonprofits.

By Jeremy Cox & Timothy B. Wheeler
Bay Journal

High Flows to Chesapeake Continued in July, Triggering Large Dead Zone

August 14, 2019 by Bay Journal 1 Comment

The Susquehanna exceeds its banks at Port Deposit during a high flow period in September 2018. Bay Journal photo by Dave Harp

The Bay continued to be on the receiving end of high river flows in July. The flows have been higher than normal for 13 out of the last 15 months, according to data from the U.S. Geological Survey.

The pollution carried into the Bay during that span has led to worse than normal water quality and last month triggered a large oxygen-starved “dead zone” in the Bay.

In July, the USGS reported that the estimated cumulative flow into the Bay from its nine largest rivers — which account for more than 95% of the freshwater entering the Bay — averaged 54,000 cubic feet per second. That was the 15th highest flow on record for the month since the agency began tracking river flows into the Bay in 1936.

So far this year, the flows were above normal in five of the first seven months of the year. That followed an eight-month period from May through December last year when flows were above normal every month.

The USGS considers a flow to be above normal if it is among the top 25% for a given month.

The data is available on a new USGS web page.

High freshwater flows are typically bad news for Bay water quality because they carry large amounts of water-fouling nutrients and sediments, which are flushed off the landscape and into the Chesapeake.

In the Bay, nutrients fuel algae blooms that cloud the water. As the blooms die and decompose, they are consumed by bacteria in a process that depletes water of oxygen. Sediment also clouds the water and smothers bottom habitats.

Scientists have been worried that the protracted period of high flows will lead to a decline in underwater grass beds, which need sunlight to survive. Earlier this year they predicted that the huge influx of nutrients would lead to a greatly expanded dead zone.

Indeed, the Maryland Department of Natural Resources reported that the area of low oxygen, or hypoxic, water was significantly worse than average during its two July water quality monitoring surveys.

In early July, the DNR reported a dead zone of 1.92 cubic miles in the Maryland portion of the Bay, compared with an average of 1.36 cubic miles. In late July, scientists found 2.01 cubic miles of low-oxygen water, compared with the late July average of 1.34 cubic miles.

Along with pollution, high flows added a surge of freshwater to the Bay that kept salinity low near the surface, causing strong stratification between the surface and higher salinity bottom waters. That essentially traps oxygen-starved water on the bottom and prevents it from mixing with the oxygen-rich surface.

DNR scientists said conditions also were aggravated by temperatures that warmed Bay waters to nearly 90 degrees. Warmer water holds less oxygen than cool water.

The department’s monitoring reports are available here.

By Karl Blankenship

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