The Watermen and the Dead Zone

I have two stories in today's newspaper and I think you could draw a connection between them other than the fact that they both concern the Chesapeake. On the front page, Virginia Institute of Marine Science professor Robert Diaz is shining a light on the increase in "dead zones" appearing in coastal waters around the world. Inside the paper, several Virginia watermen's groups are uniting under one umbrella organization in order to project a stronger voice in debates about fishing regulations and the health of the bay. Stick with me for a second and I'll show you how I connect the dots between the two.

The watermen were spurred to action earlier this year when Virginia and Maryland said they were going to severely restrict the blue crab harvest in order to resuscitate the depleted and weakened crab stock. The scientific studies were clear: Crab harvesting had been too heavy the past 15 years, during a time when the crabs were not bouncing back in numbers like they have typically and cyclically done. This is when the watermen began to protest. Everyone from Virginia to New York knows that the Bay has been suffering for decades because of pollution, they said, but all the blame is put on us?

The watermen, or, many of them at least, will also tell you they don't buy the scientists' numbers. They don't buy that the winter dredge survey -- the backbone of all population estimates and any measuring stick for gauging overfishing -- can possibly be accurate. Some will even tell you they think the Virginia Marine Resources Commission is out to rid the bay of every last waterman, not to regulate and promote a healthy fishing industry. But the winter dredge survey, performed by VIMS and Maryland Department of Natural Resources, has proved to be remarkably accurate in predicting each year's harvest for almost two decades now. And does it really make sense that the people charged with looking out for the state's fishing industry are in fact, behind the curtain, scheming to undermine it?

But here's where the watermen have a point, and here's where the two stories from today overlap. Diaz, the VIMS professor, pointed out that the dead zone in the Chesapeake each year snuffs out about 75,000 tons of worms and clams and invertebrates that would serve as food for crabs and fish. That 75,000 tons of food would feed about half the annual blue crab harvest in the Chesapeake, Diaz said. How much is the constant load of pollution simply weighing down the Bay's ability to support life? This is just one example of the constant pressure on the Chesapeake's ecosystem. For all the damage heavy fishing may do to individual species stocks, like the blue crab, the pollution remains the overwhelming problem. The effort to clean up the Bay would be well served by watermen joining the chorus of voices making that argument.