Chesapeake Bay is 40% dead zone now?

Chesapeake Bay Dead Zones Are Killing Off Fish in the Masses | TakePart

I believe it, since when I try fishing, there is nothing much there anymore. In the 80's I caught flounder spot croaker easily.
Last year caught only small croakers.
So far this year caught nothing, not even bites.

Article claims back in 2013,
"On the eve of the next dead zone invasion, a new study says that past hypoxic zones destroyed the Bay’s bottom-feeding fish."

And it is all due to land issues not boat issues. Making it a no discharge zone for boats will have zero impact on the water.

A just-completed, 10-year-long study of the bay’s fishes by researchers from the Virginia Institute of Marine Science proves that low-oxygen dead zones—created by nitrogen runoff from farms and cities—are having a serious impact on bottom-feeding fish, including perch, bass, flounder and more, which are all key members of the local ecosystem.

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Just this spring a sewer line break in Hampton City dumped millions of gallons of raw sewage into the Back river. My boat is slipped in Harris creek a tributary of the Back river. Maybe better to go to the bay bridge tunnel to fish. It is about 11 mile trip.

I wonder if wind powered air pumps/aerators could help. Might need to be too huge or too many to work. The thought has been running around in my head.

My Grandpa lived on a shallow lake up in N. Wisconsin, and when it froze over the winter it would go hypoxic and kill lots of fish. He rigged up a couple of those 1970's car smog pumps with washing machine motors and ran hoses out into the lake and anchored them on the bottom. Left them running all winter. Result was more fish in the spring.

I grew up on the northern bay from the mid 50's on. It got bad, then got better. In the mid 90's it was OK. No clue as to what's going in now, but as long as the agricultural run-off from the Susquehanna, which drains much of PA, I don't expect it to recover unless land based solutions are implemented..

Agricultural and industrial runoff is only a part of the problem....an aeration wouldn't help much either because it's the pollution that's depleting the oxygen.

Shellfish--crabs, clams and oysters--are nature's "sewage treatment plants." 25 acres of tidal flats is typically home to enough of them to completely cleanse the pollution--including many toxic substances--from a population of 100,000 people. The Bay was once teeming with them, and when it was, the waters were clear...but over-fishing them coupled with a virus (I think it inferferes with reproduction) that's crippled the oyster population along with continuing to harvest a dwindling number has all but wiped them out.

I once asked how much impact a 5 year moratorium on shellfishing would have...the gov't pays farmers not to grow crops, it could do the same for the watermen. It's a good idea, but till they find the cure for the virus, it wouldn't help much.

Looks like that article is from 2013.


The "Trophy" rockfish season up here was OK this year. The increased 35" minimum (this year) meant we had to put some back, but otherwise we did about as well as we usually do... and others we know around here are doing about the same.


In addition to the shellfish shortage, we read that menhaden are another critical filter fish... and we also read that we don't get as many up here as necessary because apparently Virginia politicians allow Omega Protein to catch most of their Atlantic allotment... from within the lower Chesapeake, instead of offshore.


-Chris

The problem is obvious - too many humans. The solution - a moratorium on humans!

Peggie- Perhaps the answer is aggressive oyster "farming". Get the benefit of their filtration and the farmer can sell them.

Also, I know the cause of hypoxia is high nutrient loading and aeration will not change that.. But higher DO2 levels would compensate. Keeps the breakdown of bio material from going anaerobic. Probably easier to aerate than to solve the nutrient issue. Just thinking aloud..

WesK said:

The problem is obvious - too many humans. The solution - a moratorium on humans!

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You are absolutely right. Most all big problems we are facing can be traced to this fact. But talk about the most un-PC thing to say!!! Don't hint at such things and expect to be a politician.

Dead menhaden wash up on Eastern Shore after fish spill from Omega Protein boat - Daily Press

If you keep destroying fish that feed other fish, they. the other fish will starve and move elsewhere.
Ironic, menhaden harvesters turn these into fertilizer and pet food, which returns again to the Chesapeake Bay as excess concentrated nutrients, creating hypoxic zones, killing everything.

Some encouraging news, grasses are up in the bay for 2016.
So maybe things will eventually get better.
At the house, I do not fertilize the grass, I grow Zoysia and Carpet grasses.

It is runoff from farms and cities causing this nutrient pollution, not boaters.

Ski in NC said:

You are absolutely right. Most all big problems we are facing can be traced to this fact. But talk about the most un-PC thing to say!!! Don't hint at such things and expect to be a politician.

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I don't do "politically correct". I call a spade a spade, not a long handled digging implement.

Perhaps the answer is aggressive oyster "farming". Get the benefit of their filtration and the farmer can sell them.

Any moratorium on shellfishing would naturally require introducing more stock, but that's not possible until the virus is eliminated because new oysters introduced into the ecosystem become infected with it...which would make "farming" oysters a losing proposition.

State of the Bay Report 2014 - Landing - Chesapeake Bay Foundation
Good read on the state of the Chesapeake.
Oyster production is increasing due to government management of the beds. I spoke with a Chesapeake Bay Foundation expert and he said that the beds have to be worked for the oysters to thrive. He said you cant just seed and let them alone. They actually pay waterman to rake beds that wont be open for the season.

Ski in NC said:

You are absolutely right. Most all big problems we are facing can be traced to this fact. But talk about the most un-PC thing to say!!! Don't hint at such things and expect to be a politician.

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You're right Ski, "PC" certainly applies to both sides of the aisle these days. As you know the boys in Raleigh passed a law forbidding any coastal planning, local or state, from using any assumptions about water levels rising. A country of ostriches...

Greetings,
I love eating oysters but I absolutely refuse to buy or even eat any harvested from the Chesapeake or the Gulf of Mexico due to the contamination situation in both locations.

Every year we host cages of oyster spat off our dock to be planted in the Magothy River leading to the Bay. The upper Magothy is not a great environment for the oysters. :-( I wonder if it wouldn't be more helpful to have fully grown oysters instead.

The Magothy is fresh water...Don't oysters need salt?

caltexflanc said:

You're right Ski, "PC" certainly applies to both sides of the aisle these days. As you know the boys in Raleigh passed a law forbidding any coastal planning, local or state, from using any assumptions about water levels rising. A country of ostriches...

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I can say this since I'm from NC and lived all my life there until July 1, 2012. Remember when Barney Fife moved to Raleigh. If he was doing that today, he'd be the smartest guy there.

RT Firefly said:

Greetings,
I love eating oysters but I absolutely refuse to buy or even eat any harvested from the Chesapeake or the Gulf of Mexico due to the contamination situation in both locations.

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That is uninformed. Stingray Point oysters are some of the best to be found anywhere.

BandB said:

I can say this since I'm from NC and lived all my life there until July 1, 2012. Remember when Barney Fife moved to Raleigh. If he was doing that today, he'd be the smartest guy there.

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None of this is true. A study that was issued a few years ago had many doubters so they ordered another. The estimates of sea level rise were slightly less (still a lot, 1.5+ meters I think). And new regulations have and are being developed from this metric.

WesK said:

I don't do "politically correct". I call a spade a spade, not a long handled digging implement.

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Clearly Global Warming.

Which is why the world governments like having conferences to pat themselves on the back and what a wonderful job they are doing to limit greenhouse gases. Didn't Obama attend one of those conferences recently?

What is unstated are the uncertainty of the solutions. In other words, we could stop putting any CO2 in the atmosphere tomorrow and it's certainly not clear what would happen in the long run.

But our focus on HCCC allows us to ignore problems we could actually solve like over-fishing, stopping toxic runoff and maybe even trying to save the 4 women who are killed each day in Pakistan in honor killings.

Global warming, or global cooling has nothing to do with the Chesapeake die off. The seal levels were much higher and also much lower in ages past. Life gets along fine with changes in climate, but life and human pollution do not.

Increase in CO2 makes green things grow better, so do warmer temps. Scaremongers are looking for dollars as in government research handouts and make speeches and have fame to fuel their 'global warming' lifestyles.

The area of drainage that goes into the Chesse is huge.

Simply banning lawn fertilizer for home owners and municipal areas might solve the problem.

I guess the operative word is "zones." We were Rockfishing last Tuesday just south of the Choptank and did OK. My totally unscientific take is that the Bay has so many streams feeding it, it would seem that the pollution impact would be highly variable in a body of water that enormous. These are from last year.

Reduce the limit size of Rockfish: they love juvenile Blue Crab and peelers. Bigger fish eat more, therefore reducing the survival rate of crabs. Crabs help clean the Bay. When they started raising the limit size on Rockfish the crab population began to suffer. My dad was a commercial crabber and over the last 25 years I have gotten to know many crabbers. They will say the same thing.

And AG runoff is a huge problem in the Bay which gets little airtime in the news.

Islanddreamer said:

Reduce the limit size of Rockfish: they love juvenile Blue Crab and peelers. Bigger fish eat more, therefore reducing the survival rate of crabs. Crabs help clean the Bay. When they started raising the limit size on Rockfish the crab population began to suffer. My dad was a commercial crabber and over the last 25 years I have gotten to know many crabbers. They will say the same thing.

And AG runoff is a huge problem in the Bay which gets little airtime in the news.

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Yeah, but that's one of those balance issues. Reducing the size limit on striped bass often also means more people catch more "keepers" -- which can in turn impact rockfish levels, too. There's probably a sweet spot in there somewhere, but it's also probably a moving target from year to year.

Ag run-off gets mentioned a lot around here.

Sewage spills.... hit or miss...

-Chris

A read of Michener's "Chesapeake" I found interesting in this regard, forty years ago!

And Richard, you are so right. With the unfettered chasing of whatever global warming is, the real world air and water issues indeed get neglected.

Daddyo said:

None of this is true. A study that was issued a few years ago had many doubters so they ordered another. The estimates of sea level rise were slightly less (still a lot, 1.5+ meters I think). And new regulations have and are being developed from this metric.

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North Carolina Sea Level Rises Despite State Senators - Scientific American

Are you disputing this, or the fact that Barney would indeed be the smartest man in NC government?

caltexflanc said:

North Carolina Sea Level Rises Despite State Senators - Scientific American

Are you disputing this, or the fact that Barney would indeed be the smartest man in NC government?

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In many coastal areas land subsidence is as much an issue as real terms water level rising. The net effect is the same but causation totally different.

There are (as of now anyway) no grants or government funds available to blame white males for continental drift and magmatic fluid actions.

sunchaser said:

In many coastal areas land subsidence is as much an issue as real terms water level rising. The net effect is the same but causation totally different.

There are (as of now anyway) no grants or government funds available to blame white males for continental drift and magmatic fluid actions.

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Now that you mention it, I wondered who was to blame.

Thanks for pointing it out.

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We do not expect any acquittals.