Disease, pollution and a century of over-harvesting decimated the Chesapeake Bay's wild oyster population. As Virginia's wild oyster season gets underway, there are new harvest restrictions and concerns over the state of this key bay species.
New restrictions are aimed at part-time watermen who take the best oysters when the season opens, then leave. That puts added pressure on an already stressed wild oyster population which worries Virginia Resources Commissioner John Bull.
"We're at a point now where the stocks can't grow fast enough to provide enough oysters for the more than 1,100 license holders to harvest their daily bushel limit," says Bull. "This is not at a sustainable level."
To help, the commission voted to gradually reduce licenses to 600 over the next seven years. The state stopped issuing new licenses earlier this year and last month made it harder for oystermen to transfer their license. Kent Carr, a commercial waterman, told the commission this hurts the industry.
"The cutbacks and restrictions are getting you to the point where you're debating whether to even stay in the business," says Carr. "There's other ways to solve this problem than the route we're going on cutting working people out."
Ryan Carnegie, a shellfish pathologist at the Virginia Institute for Marine Science, says restrictions on watermen may be tough but they are giving oysters time to fight diseases that have been killing them since the 1940's and 50's.
"The bottom line is the oysters are doing pretty well at this point. The diseases haven't been affecting them dramatically," Carnegie says.
Carnegie hopes to unlock the secret of how oysters are managing to recover from diseases that have plagued them for so long.
