Bay Salmon Farm Seeks Tighter Pollution Controls

Bay Journal, Legal fight over Susquehanna salmon farm on hold as developer seeks tighter limits

The legal fight against a planned indoor salmon farm along the lower Susquehanna River has been suspended, potentially clearing a key hurdle for the project.

A Cecil County Circuit Court judge stayed a lawsuit that challenged the wastewater permit for the proposed salmon rearing facility in Port Deposit, MD . The stay came after AquaCon Maryland LLC, the Norwegian company behind the project, requested tighter pollution limits and conditions for the operation to address opponents’ concerns.

 

The Chesapeake Bay Foundation and two upper Chesapeake Bay watermen had filed suit in April 2025 challenging the permit issued by the Maryland Department of the Environment. The permit would allow the proposed facility to discharge up to 1.9 million gallons of “purge” water daily into the Susquehanna, not far from where it empties into the Bay.

That discharged water would come from tanks where fully grown salmon are held for several days before being harvested for processing and shipment to market. The holding tanks are used to purge the fish of geosmin, a harmless, naturally occurring organic compound that if not removed can give the fish an earthy odor.

In their lawsuit, the environmental group and the watermen contend that the nutrients, sediment, geosmin and any other pollutants discharged by the facility will cause or contribute to water quality problems downstream, including low dissolved oxygen levels, increased murkiness and algae blooms. They noted that the lower Susquehanna provides spawning and nursery habitat for commercially valuable fish, including striped bass, American shad, hickory shad, alewife, white perch and yellow perch.

AquaCon then asked MDE to modify its permit. It proposed setting a “net zero” limit on suspended solids and adjusting other characteristics of the discharge, including dissolved oxygen and temperature, to improve water quality and reduce possible stress on fish. The company also agreed to closer scrutiny of its plan for offsetting any nutrient pollution the facility might release into the river.

After AquaCon’s request, the litigants agreed to put the lawsuit on hold pending MDE’s issuance of a modified permit. The agency will hold a public hearing once the new permit has been made public, MDE spokesman Jay Apperson said.

I'm willing to bet they won't be appeased. The point is not to clean the Bay, it's to stop any and all industry. Watermelon environmentalists. Green on the outside and red in the middle. 

The Wombat has Rule 5 Sunday: Snow Bunnies up on time and under budget.

CBF, Watermen Oppose North Bay Salmon

 Chesapeake Bay Mag, Watermen, Bay Foundation Sue Over Indoor Salmon Farm Planned for Upper Bay

A Norwegian aquaculture company looking to build an indoor salmon farm in Maryland faces a legal challenge to its proposed location along the lower Susquehanna River.

The Chesapeake Bay Foundation and two upper Chesapeake Bay watermen filed suit April 21 in Cecil County Circuit Court challenging a wastewater discharge permit granted to the planned facility by the Maryland Department of the Environment (MDE).

AquaCon Maryland LLC plans to produce up to 20,000 metric tons of Atlantic salmon a year at the $320 million facility it proposes to build at a former naval training center in Port Deposit, Maryland.

This is the Norwegian company’s second attempt to open a salmon farm in Maryland. In 2022, it withdrew a bid to build in Federalsburg on the Eastern Shore amid concerns from environmentalists, scientists and local residents that its plan to discharge into Marshyhope Creek could harm Maryland’s only known spawning reach for endangered Atlantic sturgeon, as well as other fish.

AquaCon says its salmon will be produced sustainably on land using a “recirculating aquaculture system,” with hatchery spawned fish raised in recycled-water indoor tanks. The biological waste they generate will be converted to energy to help run the operation.

For the Port Deposit location, MDE gave final approval March 5 for AquaCon to discharge up to 1.9 million gallons of “purge” water daily into the Susquehanna. Purge water comes from tanks where fully grown salmon are briefly held before being harvested for processing and shipment to market. While free of fish waste, the water would contain geosmin, a naturally occurring organic compound that, while harmless to consume, can give farmed fish an earthy odor.

Before the water is discharged, the company plans to filter it and treat it with ultraviolet light to kill bacteria. The MDE permit sets water quality thresholds for the discharge, and it requires the company to offset the nutrient levels in the released water. It also requires the facility to monitor geosmin in its discharge for three years to ensure the levels being released are no higher than what’s normally found in the river.

But the Bay Foundation and the two watermen—Steve Lay of Havre de Grace and Blair Baltus of Essex—say the facility’s discharges of nutrients, sediment and other pollutants will cause or contribute to water quality problems downstream, including low dissolved oxygen levels, increased murkiness and algae blooms.

I would be inclined to trust MDE. 

The Wombat has Rule 5 Sunday: In & Out up at The Other McCain.

More Aquaculture for Maryland?

Maybe. Chesapeake Bay Mag,  Md. To See Soft-Shell Clam Industry Resurgence?

Morgan State University scientists are more than a year into researching whether soft-shell clams could not only be harvested from Chesapeake Bay waters but also farmed in them. The state’s aquaculture industry has grown rapidly the last decade, but it currently consists of a single species: the Eastern oyster.

Making a viable alternative out of soft-shell clams (Mya arenaria) could help growers diversify their offerings while returning the oysters filter-feeding boost to the water.

“In Maryland, by law, we are only allowed to work with native species, so that’s a big limitation,” said Ming Liu, an oyster genomics researcher leading the project. “Local oyster growers always show an interest in alternative [aquaculture] crops, especially in the upper and middle Chesapeake Bay, where low salinity is a challenge.”

Those are the places where soft-shells could be a good fit. Although growing clams can be finicky, the researchers are working to breed a version that is custom-made for Maryland waters and ready to support regional markets.

Funded by Maryland Sea Grant, the Morgan State team has successfully produced hundreds of thousands of tiny soft-shell “seeds” out of a small shellfish hatchery at PEARL, the university’s Patuxent Environmental and Aquatic Research Lab. (The juvenile clams are referred to as seeds after they have developed shells.)

Collecting soft shells the hard way

This fall, the team began taking the brood stock, grown from seed in the hatchery, to a nearby tributary of the Patuxent River to determine which growing methods will work best in wild waters.

Also called white clams, manos, longnecks and steamers, soft-shell clams are named for their comparatively thin and brittle shells, propped open by protruding leathery siphons. New Englanders, who call them Ipswich clams and are more accustomed to eating them steamed whole, use these rubbery siphons as a handle for dipping.

The market for soft-shells in the Chesapeake Bay region has come and gone over the decades alongside dramatic swings in wild harvest numbers. The soft-shell fishery hit its stride in the 1950s and ’60s, with harvesters bringing in an average of 460,000 bushels per year until the early 1970s. That’s when a string of diseases, worsening water conditions and then Tropical Storm Agnes—which wiped out soft-shells in Virginia—devastated the Bay’s wild population. Harvest totals have never come anywhere close to their mid-’60s height. After a slight rebound in the 1980s, annual takes leveled out to a few hundred bushels a year.

In 2016 and 2017, though, harvests leapt inexplicably to more than 17,000 bushels. Then heavy rains in 2018 buried the fishery’s comeback, but not before generating fresh excitement about its potential. The recent reappearance also meant that Morgan State researchers could harvest soft-shells to see how well they would grow in a hatchery environment.

MD still has a pretty active soft-shell clam fishery. The boats are unmistakable, they have what looks like a conveyer belt off the side that reaches down to the bottom into the sediment. Jets of water break up the mud and wash the clams on the way to the surface. The boats crawl along, gouging a trench and leaving behind a muddy wake. 

If they can do this in aquaculture instead of this massive mess, so much the better.

FWIW, PEARL is the lab on the Patuxent River that I used to work at, when in was under the Academy of Natural Science of Philadelphia, before it was taken over by Morgan State University. It's about 10 miles from home, across the peninsula formed by the Patuxent River.

The Wombat has Rule 5 Sunday: Mrs. Santa out on time and under budget.

New Maryland Oyster Regulations Controversial

Chesapeake Bay Mag, Maryland Oyster Fishery Proposal Controversial

The Maryland Department of Natural Resources (DNR) is considering a change to the state policy on opening oyster beds for wild harvesting.

DNR is asking for public feedback on the plan it presented at the Oct. 12 Oyster Advisory Commission. The proposal establishes criteria to create new Public Shellfish Fishery Areas (PSFAs) or expand existing public fishery areas in places with five or more oysters per square meter of bottom. DNR explains that when PSFAs were established in 2009, a process was put in place to declassify PSFAs in the event of an aquaculture lease. But there was no process to add additional public shellfish fishing areas.

DNR portrays the proposal as simply closing a gap and fulfilling the intent of the law from 2009. The creation of new PSFAs would be good news for watermen who depend on their wild oyster haul, which is a fraction of what oystermen used to pull in. But it doesn’t come without controversy. Environmental groups believe allowing new PSFAs would open a dangerous door when it comes to oyster restoration.

When a public shellfish fishery area is established, the bottom can no longer be used for oyster restoration or oyster farming. The proposal could prevent reef restoration and aquaculture in large portions of Maryland’s Bay by keeping them exclusively for commercial harvesting, the Chesapeake Bay Foundation (CBF) argues.

 

CBF says the proposal doesn’t just close a gap and fulfill the intent of the law, it’s actually a “major change in oyster management that undermines the spirit of the law.” The foundation is asking DNR to table the proposal entirely.

CBF Maryland Fisheries Scientist Allison Colden said in a statement:

“This proposal undermines the process put in place by the legislature to implement actions to increase the oyster population and end overfishing. It appears to be a one-sided proposal to increase the oyster harvest at the expense of restoration and aquaculture efforts that are helping to bring Maryland’s oysters back. Making more of Maryland’s Bay bottom off-limits to restoration and aquaculture makes no sense as oyster populations are wallowing at historic lows. The state must balance the interests of the fishery with the environmental and social benefits more oysters could provide, instead of reserving the remaining oysters in Maryland waters for harvest.”

One issue DNR points out is that the current regulations grant an aquaculture lease-holder exclusive access to harvest wild oysters from their leased bottom, even before they begin to farm oysters.

Why not? The shit from the farmed oysters would likely smother the wild oysters on the bottom. 

DNR’s proposal would include a mechanism to “preclude leaseholders from harvesting and selling wild oysters from newly acquired leases until they have invested in planting the lease area and complied with the active use requirements for at least one year.”

DNR says this could deter anyone who is motivated to pursue a lease site just to harvest and sell off existing wild oysters.

This does strike me as a small step backwards, not unexpected in the Hogan administration, which has traditionally been friendly to the watermen (which has also been true in the administrations of Democrat governors).

All of this would be irrelevant in a Fritz administration, in which harvesting wild oysters would be banned for 5-10 year, while we monitor to determine if wild oysters are still capable of widespread success in the modern Chesapeake Bay. If so, great. Open fishing on a truly sustainable plan, with an eye to keeping the populations growing. If not, explore importing other oysters (eg ariakensis) which might succeed. 

If we had adopted my plan when I first proposed it, we would be near the end of the 10 year hiatus.

The Wombat has Rule 5 Sunday: Honor Blackman  up and running for your digital pleasure.

Science Invents the Shuckless Oyster

Behind the paywall at WaPoo, but in the open at the Virginia Pilot Online: These oysters require no shucking knife. But the process has a catch.

Several years ago, W. Tolar Nolley was attending a Christmas party, where he was trying to jimmy open an oyster. "I looked up, and there was a pretty lady, and I was talking to her, and that thing just went right in," Nolley says. He means the stubby knife went right into his left hand, not the seafood. He has a jagged little scar as a permanent reminder that accidents can happen when shucker meets oyster.

I mean, who hasn't done that? But in my case, it was a beer (or three) and not a pretty lady to blame. However, I've shucked literally thousand of oysters of all sizes from thumbnail size to hand sized, and that was the only serious ding.

Nolley's product eliminates such risk, promising a clean, briny taste of the Chesapeake Bay without any of the bloodshed. It also all but eliminates the need to pry open oysters by hand. As such, No Shuck Oysters could be the final assault on a Chesapeake Bay shucking industry that once thrived but in recent decades has fallen on hard times, the victim of overharvesting, disease, a dining market that prizes oysters on the half shell, and now, possibly, Nolley's company, HPP of Virginia.

"We have the technology to accelerate aquaculture oysters," Nolley says of the expanding farmed-oyster industry along the Chesapeake, which stretches about 200 miles from Maryland to Virginia. "But we really aren't going to have the shuckers, the manpower. That's kind of an old, dying tradition."

A No Shuck Oyster, it's important to note, is not the same thing as a shucked oyster, that juicy morsel without a shell. The former relies on a pricey piece of machinery - Nolley says his smaller unit cost about $650,000 - that processes 600 oysters in just a few minutes. The machine smothers the bivalves in cold, purified water pressurized to 65,000 pounds per square inch. As a point of comparison, the water pressure of the Mariana Trench in the Pacific Ocean, which contains the deepest known points on Earth, is thought to be about 16,000 pounds per square inch, a force that can kill a human instantly.

This cold-pasteurization method is known as high-pressure processing, or HPP, and an oyster that emerges from an HPP unit has several perks: The process destroys potentially deadly pathogens without altering the bivalve's texture or, for the most part, its taste. It also extends the shelf life of the oyster by a few precious days, or longer, compared with a non-HPP oyster.

Such processing also comes with a fringe benefit, one that Nolley has turned into a selling point: Under pressure, an oyster detaches from its shell, which must then be held together with a rubber band if Nolley still wants to sell the bivalves on the half-shell market.

With an HPP oyster, all you have to do is snip the band, and the shell slowly opens on its own, revealing the frilly delicacy inside. Goodbye, shucking knife. So long, puncture wounds.

I wish we had one of those back when I was shucking bushels for analysis. But, the most important question; does it affect the taste (or texture)?

The Washington Post Food staff recently sampled several No Shuck Oysters, which are available to distributors, restaurants and even those who prefer to slurp bivalves in their privacy of their own homes (or offices). No one thought the oysters tasted especially fresh, even though they all had their liquor still trapped within their shells. "The liquor seems slimier than usual," noted one taster.

Perhaps this is a function of another one of HPP's side effects: The oyster dies under pressure, unlike a raw-bar oyster, which remains alive until you suck it down.

"It doesn't kill them like you step on them or something," says Steven Voisin, chief executive and owner of Louisiana-based Motivatit Seafoods, a pioneer in HPP oysters. "They release from the shell, so they're certainly not able to survive," Voisin continues. "You've got to keep them iced down from that point and handle them as a fresh product, kind of like a fish. You take them out of water, he's going to die, but once he dies, if he's on ice properly, he's still good for a long period of time."

So, maybe. I'll reserve judgement.

New Bills Would Protect Waterfront Homeowners from Oysters

Oyster aquaculture floats

Waterfront homeowners could have more say over oyster leases

The Maryland General Assembly is facing a number of oyster bills this session, mostly regarding sanctuaries and management. Two of those bills are seeking to bolster the authority of waterfront property owners, allowing them to reject or permit certain shellfish operations in front of their homes.

House Bill 1309 and Senate Bill 876, introduced by Del. Brian Crosby (D-St. Mary’s) and Sen. Jack Bailey (R-St. Mary’s, Calvert), would give waterfront property owners in the state the right of first refusal over those water column leases.

Put into effect in 2010, the Maryland Department of Natural Resources’ commercial program allows aquaculture farmers to purchase water column leases at $25 an acre, or submerged land leases, also known as bottom leases, at $3.50 per acre. The bottom leases, which are not visible on the water’s surface, are not included in the proposed bills.

“Most reasonable people are not against aquaculture,” Crosby said Wednesday. “But people also move to St. Mary’s County to enjoy its scenery.”

“You should have the right to say whether somebody can have those cages and the floats right in front of your house,” Bailey, a retired Maryland Natural Resources police officer, said Monday during a St. Mary’s County Chamber of Commerce breakfast at Olde Breton Inn.

“This isn’t just about views and property values, it’s a real concern about their riparian rights and having access to the water,” Theresa Kuhns, government affairs director for the Southern Maryland Association of Realtors, said.

Currently, DNR is required to notify adjacent homeowners on behalf of an applicant when they advance far enough in the application process, although they are not required to notify all nearby property owners who may be affected.

St. Mary’s Commissioner President Randy Guy (R) has also previously said DNR did not adhere to its policy of notifying county government officials when the leases were awarded.

The bills would change the application process by giving property owners 20 days after they are given notice to decide if they want to purchase that water column lease first.

“It doesn’t mean they have to use it,” Crosby said Wednesday, adding the bills would also allow the homeowner to “purchase the rights in front of their property” and re-lease that area “under their terms.”

A homeowner taking “up that area in front of their house, without using it, just to keep other people from coming in” illustrates the NIMBY, or not-in-my-back-yard, attitudes of some waterfront homeowners, said Brian Russell, president of the Southern Maryland Shellfish Association and aquaculture farmer with Shore Thing Shellfish.

I like the fact that the bills put the onus of blocking the aquaculture back on the home owners by giving them the right of first refusal, before selling the lease to the aquaculture firms. The prices seem ridiculously low, however.

St. Marys Nixes New Oyster Aquaculture

One of J.D. Blackwell's oyster leases in St. Mary's County, Md.

Not in my front yard! St. Mary’s County, MD, issues moratorium on use of commercial docks for new aquaculture leases

Responding to complaints from waterfront homeowners, officials in St. Mary’s County, MD, voted Tuesday to impose a six-month moratorium on using commercial docks to work any new state-issued aquaculture leases that would raise oysters in cages or floats.

With just three of its five members present, the Southern Maryland county’s board of commissioners adopted the moratorium by a vote of 2–1, after shortening its duration from 18 months to 180 days. One member was absent, while another recused himself from the session because he owns a waterfront home and has objected to an aquaculture lease applied for off his shoreline.

The county’s action drew criticism from the Chesapeake Bay Foundation and from a local oyster farmer, who noted that watermen have increasingly turned to aquaculture as an alternative or supplement to fickle wild harvests.

“Right at the time when watermen need a real option, we’re about to make it harder for them,” said J.D. Blackwell, owner of 38North Oysters in St. Mary’s County.

St. Mary’s has been one of Maryland’s hotbeds for oyster farming since the state moved in 2010 to expand aquaculture. There have been 99 leases issued there, covering nearly 900 acres of water. About one-fourth of those leases authorize the use of cages on the bottom or floats on the surface, while the rest only permit growing oysters on loose shell on the bottom, much as they do in the wild.

Reviving the Chesapeake Scallop

How to resurrect the Chesapeake scallop? Get diners to eat them on the half shell.

I never knew this before, but Lower Chesapeake Bay used to have a thriving scallop fishery:

The bay scallop has not been commercially viable in the Chesapeake region since 1933, when a combination of disease and a Category 4 hurricane devastated the shellfish’s sea grass habitat on the Eastern Shore of Virginia. The scallop industry along the Chesapeake, which produced nearly 2 million pounds of the sweet delicacy in 1930, has never recovered, despite multiple attempts.

But aquaculture experts, fresh off recent successes with oysters, are seeing this as a new opportunity:

Rappahannock may be the perfect company to take on the reclamation project. Cousins and co-owners Ryan and Travis Croxton have already conquered the challenge of Eastern oysters in the Chesapeake, a commercial industry that had nearly collapsed in the early 2000s. Rappahannock was an early adopter of oyster aquaculture in Virginia. The company raised its first crop of 3,000 oysters in 2002. Today, Rappa­hannock harvests 180,000 oysters a week, shipping bivalves all over the country as well as to Asia and Canada.

But it isn't easy:

What the experts and the manual will tell you are the same: Bay scallops are the hothouse flowers of shellfish. They’re finicky creatures that don’t like extreme water temperatures. They don’t grow well in low-salinity waters. They don’t like muddy waters, either. They hate rushing currents, and they require a lot more space than oysters. As if that weren’t enough, bay scallops can suffer other indignities: During spawning season in summer, oyster larvae may affix themselves to a single scallop, which will soon disappear under a bouquet of oyster shells.

During their early development stages, scallops “hate the sediment, but they hate having you rinse them off. They don’t like to get cold, and they don’t like to get hot. They’re just the wimpiest little things,” says Mark Luckenbach, professor of marine science at the Virginia institute.

The Rappahannock crew received an early lesson in bay scallop fragility. The Croxtons bought about 50,000 larvae from a hatchery in New York. As part of the painstaking process to transition the scallops into Chincoteague waters, the Rappahannock team placed the larvae in an upweller system, where the embryonic shellfish are fed nutrients and given a safe space to grow until they’re ready for a natural environment. At least that’s the theory. But a water pump broke on one of the upwellers, and a farmhand didn’t check it for two days.

“We lost a ton [of scallops]. That was just stupidity,” says Ryan Croxton. “That was an easy lesson: Just don’t do that again.”

OK, so it's not that easy, but with practice, I'm sure they can make it work.

Then there’s the marketing side. Part of the reason scallops haven’t recovered in the Chesapeake, says Luckenbach, is that there hasn’t been a consumer market developed for them. The key, Luckenbach adds, is whether diners will be willing to eat scallops on the half shell, with the stomach, intestines and mantle folds visible, looking like an oyster on the half shell that dressed up for a Goth convention. (Typically, only the adductor muscle — a clean ivory nubbin of flesh — is served as a bay scallop.) When eaten on the half shell, a bay scallop tastes like a cross between a sea urchin and the larger sea scallops found in the world’s oceans.

If diners won’t accept scallops on the half shell, there will be little reason for Chesapeake aquaculture farmers to adopt the shellfish. After all, they wouldn’t be able to compete with the major bay scallop producers, whether in Chile or China, who can sell seafood much cheaper.

The lesson is that the scallop can come back to the Bay, if people have an economic reason to do so.

Maryland Watermen Oppose Seafood

More specifically, watermen oppose efforts at oyster aquaculture in  Chesapeake Bay: First oyster farm in Kent County encounters choppy waters

. . . Budden spent three years researching how he would establish an oyster company, what kind of gear he would need and the best place to grow his crop before applying for a lease in spring 2013.

In May 2014, the Department of Natural Resources approved Budden’s 4-acre proposed lease north of Ringold Point and put it out for the next step: the public feedback process.

Budden thought he’d be able to start his oyster farm quickly and had even lined up some part-time workers after the May 14 approval. But then, within the 30-day comment period, waterman Wayne Wilson protested the lease and pressed his case at a DNR hearing in Centreville, in neighboring Queen Anne’s County.

Budden still felt optimistic. He had the support of the Kent County Chamber of Commerce, environmental groups, and the current and former Chestertown mayors. On Nov. 18, Budden went before the Kent County Commissioners to describe his project. They voted unanimously to support it.

But one month later, Commissioner Ron Fithian changed his mind. He wrote to the state questioning the project. Then, Fithian decided Kent County would have its own public hearing — something the state does not require.

Fithian, a former waterman and current Rock Hall town manager, is chairman of the Clean Chesapeake Coalition, a group openly critical of the DNR’s oyster restoration policies — in particular, the prohibition on power-dredging for oysters north of the Bay Bridge. . . 

If it were up to me, I'd ban the fishing and "restoration" of wild oysters for 5 or even 10 years to see if they are even capable of increasing their populations in the Bay. As for aquaculture, I'd prefer to see it spread.

Aquaculture is Great - Just Not in My Backyard

Proposed Aquaculture Lease Touches Off Rights Debate

A proposed water column lease in the Chincoteague Bay off South Point for the purpose of aquaculture has become the touchstone of a much larger debate about the public’s right to recreate in state waters and has now resulted in a bill introduced in the General Assembly aimed at preserving those fundamental and historic rights.

The Maryland Department of Natural Resources (DNR) is considering an application for a water column lease in a vast area off South Point pre-approved for aquaculture activities. However, residents in the area and others have filed a formal protest of the proposal, citing a possible infringement on their ability to use the site for recreation in the form of swimming, boating, fishing and other activities.

While the local residents against the proposal do not oppose aquaculture in a larger sense, they have voiced grave concerns about the site proposed for the lease under consideration and have filed a formal protest to the application. At a prior hearing with the Office of Administrative Hearings (OAH) in Baltimore County late last year, the protesting group did not make a strong showing and the OAH ruled in favor of the applicant and dismissed the appeal.

About that "right to recreate"?

According to a coalition of private citizens against the proposed aquaculture lease off South Point, it was stated during the administrative hearing, “On Maryland waters, Maryland does not recognize the right to recreate.” During the same hearing, the Attorney General’s office reportedly dismissed the public’s right to recreationally use the tidewaters in question, saying “the parties all own boats and navigate over the proposed leases, sometimes at night, and that they fish, jet ski, water ski, wake surf and engage in other recreational activities,” and further said “essentially they assert a right to recreate anywhere they would like on Chincoteague Bay, but as stated, there is no right to recreate.”

First, what they are losing is not "the right to recreate" it is the "the right to recreate anywhere I damn well please, including the waters most convenient to me".  Certainly, not all of Chincoteague Bay will be placed off limit, so their right to "recreate" is not being substantially affected.  They could always play shuffleboard or some other state approved game.

I do have some sympathy for their plight.  I would be a little resentful if the state suddenly decided to make a large portion of the Bay off my beach unavailable for boating and fishing to give to some private company to make money off.  However, it does happen, and it has to happen to some extent.  I lost several of my best fishing holes to "security zone" (really security theater zones) after 9/11/2001.  I don't like it, but I'm not taking the state, Constellation Energy Group or Dominion Gas to court to get them back; nor would I expect to win such an action.

Putting Politics Before Science: White House Edition

Obama's Science Commitment, FDA Face Ethics Scrutiny in Wake of GMO Salmon Fiasco

Questions are emerging about the breakdown of the federal government’s science integrity process in the wake of the Food & Drug Administration’s long-delayed release of its approval of the first genetically modified animal for human consumption.

The AquAdvantage salmon developed by AquaBounty Technologies of Massachusetts—an Atlantic salmon modified with a growth hormone gene from Chinook salmon so it grows to maturity faster—had been winding its way through the federal approval process for 17 years. Two years ago, the FDA had said it was going to release its environmental assessment, the final document in the approval process, within weeks. It was finally and quietly posted on the FDA’s website only last Friday—just hours before the long holiday weekend—and published in the Federal Register on Wednesday.

Genetically modified salmon behind unmodified salmon

Ah, a Friday night document dump, the time-honored method of hiding information from an incurious press.

The release came, FDA sources say, in response to the publication of an investigation in Slate by the Genetic Literacy Project two days before, on December 19. The GLP, which I head, had reported that the FDA had definitively concluded last spring that the fish would have “no significant impact” on the environment and was “as safe as food from conventional Atlantic salmon.” However, the draft assessment, dated April 19, 2012, was not released—blocked on orders from the White House.

The seven month delay, sources within the government say, came after discussions late last spring between Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sibelius’ office and officials linked to Valerie Jarrett at the Executive Office, who were debating the political implications of approving the GM salmon. Genetically modified plants and animals are controversial among the president’s political base, which was thought critical to his reelection efforts during a low point in the president’s popularity.

President Obama withheld the approval for seven months for the purposes of his own election.  His campaign committee should be sued by AquaBounty for any lost revenue  due to the delay.  And someone at the FDA, probably several someones, should be fired.  It's too much to hope for Valarie Jarrett to be censured.

Triploid Oysters, For the Months Without 'R's

A pretty good article on the use of triploid oysters in aquaculture here in the Bay.

Aquaculture endeavor aims to produce a more-sterile oyster

...the triploid oyster, a virtually sterile creature that grows faster and is more disease-resistant than wild or domesticated diploid oysters and, just as important, can be eaten in summer without the loss of taste and texture that afflicts bivalves tied to spawning cycles. The triploid might just put to rest the adage that oysters should be consumed only in months with an "R" in their name. Without question, the triploid increasingly is the go-to oyster of Chesapeake watermen.

Historically, oysters were not consumed months without Rs (May, June, July, August) for two reasons.  First, oysters spawn in the summer months, and are rather thin and watery as a result.  They're perfectly edible but they are not the plump oysters of fall and winter, which are accumulating the material to produce eggs (essentially all legal size oysters are females, since they change sex from male to female as they grow).  Triploid oysters are sterile from the extra chromosomes (being unable to match the chromosomes into pairs for meiosis. Hence, they don't spawn, and continue to accumulate the good stuff all summer long.  Hence edible all year long!

The second historical reason for the 'R' months rule was lack of refrigeration.  Oysters don't keep or ship too well at high temperatures, and so before refrigeration was widespread, oysters could only be held for long periods at low temperatures during cooler months (unless somebody was saving ice and snow from winter, which was done).

The months with 'R's rule has also been applied to mussels and other shellfish in various places, including the West Coast.  The reason there (refrigeration aside) is that summer months are usually when the toxic red tides bloom, and ordinary edible mussels can become deadly toxic. At least in the Bay, that has not become a problem.