The news was good, and the scientists and policy makers gathered on the banks of the South River yesterday were half-giddy: The Chesapeake Bay's life-giving underwater grasses grew abundantly last year. Dead zones with no oxygen shrank slightly. And the bay's main pollutant, nitrogen, was as low on average as it has been in more than a decade.
"This is where we see the fruition of 15 years' worth of hard work," said Robert Magnien, a scientist with the Maryland Department of Natural Resources, wearing a necktie and waders, knee-deep in jade-green river water to announce researchers' findings for 1997. "The people of Maryland have struggled so long to reduce [pollution] in Chesapeake Bay. One obvious message is, it works."
The Chesapeake's 13 varieties of underwater grasses expanded their reach by almost 6,000 acres between 1996 and 1997, an increase of almost 9 percent, according to an annual survey by Virginia Institute of Marine Sciences researcher Robert Orth. That's a significant gain in shelter for young fish and crabs, food for waterfowl, erosion protection for people, and other natural benefits the grasses provide.
About 69,000 acres of underwater meadows grow on the bay bottom -- almost twice the area as in 1984, when the grasses reached their nadir, and more than halfway to the region's official restoration goal of 114,000 acres.
But it's not clear whether most of the credit for 1997's apparent rebound belongs to humankind or to Mother Nature, which sent the region a relatively dry year, reducing the flow of pollutants from land to water. Though scientists found slightly less oxygen-starved water along the bay bottom and lower levels of nitrogen, which fuels algae blooms, "it will be a few years before we know if those improvements are part of a trend or are just due to the drought and low flow," said a Chesapeake Bay Program scientist, Carlton Haywood, in a report released yesterday. And there's a dark spot amid the bright news. For the fifth straight year, bay grasses declined in Tangier Sound, where the underwater meadows provide vital shelter to young blue crabs.
Shrinkage
In 1992, grasses covered more than 18,000 acres of bottom in the sound and around the islands that form its western edge. By 1997, those grassy areas had shrunk by nearly half, to about 9,400 acres.
The Tangier Sound losses are ominous because the area's underwater grasses provide early-season shelter for young blue crabs, croakers, and other bay creatures making their annual spring migration from the sea.
