Reserve Openings Put Special Interests Ahead of Oyster Restoration

Annapolis, MD – In a move that makes it clear that Maryland officials' priorities still lay with the commercial fishing industry and not with oyster restoration, the Department of Natural Resources (DNR) will celebrate the oyster season on Monday, December 3, by holding a media event to coincide with the opening of managed reserves. On a rotational basis, reserves are opened to commercial exploitation of dwindling oyster stocks. This year, reserves will be opened in the Chester, Choptank and Patuxent Rivers through March.

“It would be nice if the DNR had a celebration of oysters recognizing their ecological value if left in the water,” said Robert Glenn, executive director of CCA MD. “Instead, we celebrate the taking of oysters in areas where some of the only living oysters are on these managed reserves, large, healthy oysters in densities 100 times or greater than surrounding oyster bars.”

Responding to criticism brought on by a lack of restoration effort, managers and those with a vested interest in subsidizing the industry through shell planting and seeding devised the managed reserve program about seven years ago. The result was more taxpayer money to plant shell and seed under the promise that reserves would be kept closed until 50% of the oysters reached 4 inches (the legal size limit is 3 inches) or disease threatened surviving oysters.

Proponents of opening reserves argue that it is done to save oysters from disease, which fails to appreciate the ecological value of these oysters for their water filtering capabilities, spawning potential and potential disease resistance. They point out that an average restored oyster reef filters an additional 470 million gallons of water per acre when oysters are allowed to grow to 4 inches instead of 3 inches, but are silent about the lost filtering that results from opening reserves.

“DNR’s oyster management goals to restore oysters and sustain a commercial oyster fishery are incompatible,” said Sherman Baynard, chairman of CCA MD’s Fisheries Committee. “After spending millions of taxpayer dollars to support a put and take oyster fishery with minimal spending on restoration Maryland has fewer oysters than it did in 1994, the baseline oyster population used to measure the 2000 Chesapeake Bay agreement goal of a 10-fold increase by 2010. That goal couldn’t be met by 2010 if it rained oysters from the sky.”

CCA MD has been a longtime critic of DNR’s oyster management. Instead of relying on the time tested fisheries management tool of reducing fishing mortality to restore a collapsed oyster population, a cost effective tool that has an immediate impact, DNR has relied on shell planting and seeding, a long-term, expensive and failed strategy. Subsidies for managed reserves cost taxpayers an estimated $2 for every $1 of oysters harvested.