Oh Oysters Come and Walk With Us..

A couple of articles about oysters in the news today.  First, CBFs Blog has a post about a Maryland  house bill that would prevent the establishment of oyster sanctuary over more the 25% of the "quality habitat", whatever that means :

Senate Bill 538 would prohibit the state agency from designating more than 25 percent of the quality oyster habitat in the Bay as oyster sanctuaries, protected from dredging and other forms of harvesting.

The state Senate, unfortunately, endorsed this ill-advised legislation by a vote of 38-9 on March 16, and now the state House is considering the bill today. I hope it quietly drowns.

Me too.  If it were up to me, we would have an immediate moratorium on collecting native oysters off bars for at least five years, to determine how well the population would respond to the release from fishing mortality.

The second article, which is found in various forms around the bay today, concerns a program to hire 750 watermen to "restore oyster habitat".  Essentially the program hires watermen to dredge shell from unproductive oyster bars to oyster sanctuaries, where, hopefully, the shell will be colonized with healthy oysters.

In part, the program is a "pay back" for restrictive crab limits in the last two years (which have successfully increased the crab stocks). It is available only to watermen with a relatively clean legal record:

The Department of Natural Resources says the watermen will work on nearly two dozen oyster bars. The department says watermen can’t have any significant Natural Resources violations since 2008 to participate in the program. Captains are paid $500 day with a guaranteed nine days of work. Each boat can also have a single crew member, who will be paid $150 a day.

The work is being paid for with the help of federal grants that followed a 2008 disaster declaration for the bay’s crab fishery.

Watermen express doubts because the oyster sanctuaries are off limit to oystering.  In practice, sanctuaries last until the populations get healthy, then the state finds itself under pressure to allow harvesting, and usually caves on the issue.

The program concerns me from a different basis, the oyster diseases.  We don't have much of handle on how the major oyster diseases, Dermo and MSX are transmitted in the wild, but transplanting shell (and oysters) from sick areas to healthy areas sounds like a significant risk to me.