Tom Horton, a Bay Journal columnist, has written many articles and books about the Chesapeake Bay, including “Turning the Tide: Saving the Chesapeake Bay” and “An Island Out of Time: A Memoir of Smith Island in the Chesapeake.” He currently teaches writing and environmental topics at Salisbury (Maryland) University.
As I verge on 15 years of teaching about the Chesapeake Bay at Maryland’s Salisbury University, where my grandad was a founding faculty member almost a century ago, one theme that has run throughout is this: Where we have done the science, we’ve made progress on the bay’s health. Where we haven’t, we haven’t.
I don’t mean just “eureka” breakthroughs but also the routine data gathering that, if pursued long term, is crucial to comprehending what’s going on in hyperdynamic ecosystems like our estuary, where natural variability can render short-term measurements useless.
Doing the science with blue crabs and striped bass has paid off with at least a solid framework for sustainability. With shad and oysters, it was too little or too late, and we’re playing catch-up.
The science that identified nitrogen from sewage and farms as a key bay pollutant transformed restoration efforts. Ignoring science that showed dirty air was also a major nitrogen source set us back years.
For a scientist, doing the science is often all they need to do, but sometimes, public advocacy is appropriate. And it can be perilous: High state officials tried to fire the late Dr. Donald Heinle, a University of Maryland scientist who had lent critical support to a lawsuit that overturned Maryland’s faulty pollution-control strategy.
Which brings me to a shoutout to Dr. David Secor, a fisheries ecologist at Maryland’s Chesapeake Biological Laboratory.
Secor has done fascinating work using the otoliths, or ear bones, of bay fish. He can age them by counting annual growth rings, as you would with a tree. The bones can also reveal how many times a fish has returned from the ocean to the bay to spawn, as well as its daily growth rate after being spawned — relating survival in this vulnerable stage to environmental conditions.
He got one venerable striped bass that was 33 years old, older than Secor was at the time. It remains the oldest documented rockfish — though not the largest because it was a male, the smaller of the sexes.
Secor’s otolith work with trophy rockfish caught in the 1990s was elegant confirmation of earlier science that had led to a Chesapeake moratorium on catching them from 1987-92.
That moratorium came in the nick of time. Counting growth rings showed overfishing had been so severe that there was a decadelong gap, where virtually no females reached spawning age.
A spectrum of spawning ages lends resilience to the striper’s perpetuation, Secor says. Some years, the majority of spawners simply “guess wrong,” releasing eggs and sperm as the bay warms, to be devastated by an untimely cold front. But different-age fish spawn across a range of times, ensuring against a wholesale wipeout.
Which brings me to Atlantic sturgeon, far more endangered than rockfish ever were, extinct from most of the bay’s rivers, federally endangered in the rest.
A sturgeon success story
The bay’s environmental community came together wonderfully and successfully a few months ago to oppose a shameful decision by Maryland’s Department of the Environment to allow a giant salmon aquaculture facility to discharge directly into the spawning grounds of the last two or three dozen sturgeon in the entire Maryland portion of the Chesapeake.
Opposition was a textbook campaign, involving a range of large and small environmental groups and locals who’d never before protested. As a result, AquaCon, the Norwegian backer, withdrew its project
So congrats are in order all around, from the Chesapeake Bay Foundation down to the mayor and council of tiny Federalsburg, just a few miles from the Delaware border on Marshyhope Creek, the Nanticoke River tributary where the remnant sturgeon hang on.
But the real key — in my opinion and that of others I’ve talked to — was that Dave Secor weighed in on the issue. He’d been researching sturgeon in the Marshyhope for 10 years, ever since one of the prehistoric-looking fish jumped into an angler’s boat, announcing to the world that its kind was not extinct in Maryland.
Science was the clincher
Secor’s research — aided by Maryland Department of Natural Resources biologists who weren’t as free to speak publicly — lent priceless credibility and made arguments very hard for AquaCon to refute.
And he went beyond that, in testimony at hearings and in op-ed columns, framing the issue better than anyone else could have: The sturgeon, which can grow to 14 feet (about 10 feet seen so far in the Marshyhope) and live for many decades, “have no choice where they can go,” Secor said. Their evolutionary mandate draws them back each fall to the river of their birth, where the rare mix of fine cobble on the bottom offers a perfect substrate for their eggs.
Unlike the fish, AquaCon had many choices.
The untested scope of the salmon facility, expected to produce more seafood annually than that of Maryland’s entire crab harvest, posed an “existential threat,” Secor said.
He didn’t use that term lightly, but he used it accurately: Given the small size of their population, sturgeon supremely lack the resilience of, say, rockfish spawning by the tens of thousands across dozens of river systems. It was, even without additional threats, “balanced on a knife’s edge.”
I don’t think anyone wanted to gamble with extinction to make farmed filets.
Tom Miller, director of his lab, “had my back,” Secor told me. “And the administration (of the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science) was supportive.” Indeed, decades ago, Don Heinle’s boss also had his back when he opposed the state in court.
“The message was not opposing aquaculture,” Secor said of his defense of sturgeon. “It was just that this was the wrong place.”
So here’s to sturgeon, and to academic freedom and courageous scientists.
