Watermen claim – without scientific support - that power dredging is actually good for oysters and the bay. That was almost half of the total harvest, with the rest caught with metal scoop-like devices lowered from boats (called patent tongs and hand tongs), or by divers. Watermen this past winter caught 178,000 bushels of oysters worth $7.8 million using power dredges. Over the last five years, as oyster populations have multiplied, the number of watermen buying licenses from the state and reporting power dredging has skyrocketed - rising from 418 in 2010 to 723 this year, according to the Maryland Department of Natural Resources. The state slowly began to legalize power dredging in certain parts of the bay in the early 1980s, then expanded power-dredging zones in 1999, 2003, and 2013. It was invented just after the Civil War, but banned by the state for more than a century because it removes too many oysters too fast and rips up oyster reefs. Power dredging is a method of scraping oysters from the bay’s bottom with a metal rake-like device and bag dragged behind a motorized work boat. “And Maryland is a big business, and the seafood business is a big business, and you’ve got to run it like a business.”Īn issue of debate is power dredging. “The attitude has already changed in Annapolis. Brown, president of the Maryland Watermen’s Association.īrown is lobbying the Hogan Administration to replace some of the state’s new oyster sanctuaries with “rotational harvest areas” that allow watermen to come in after three or four years and dredge or scoop out the oysters so they can sell them. “These oyster sanctuaries as we got them now, I don’t see how they are benefitting anyone,” said Robert T. This fragile progress may be threatened, however, by a new push by watermen under Governor Larry Hogan’s Administration to open up these no-harvesting sanctuaries and expand power dredging for oysters in the bay. And in 2010 Governor Martin O’Malley’s administration created sanctuaries to protect 24 percent of the bay’s remaining oyster reefs. Good weather conditions have helped reproduction. Since 2010, oyster populations in the bay have begun to creep upward again. The continued decline of the bay’s keystone species was in part because of disease, and in part because watermen continued to harvest oysters at rates far beyond what was sustainable. But despite taxpayer-funded projects to plant millions of young oysters, the number of oysters in the bay actually fell by half over that decade, plummeting to just a third of one percent of historic levels in the northern bay. In the year 2000, Maryland and the other Chesapeake Bay region states set a goal of increasing the number of oysters in the bay by 10 fold by 2010.
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