June 13, 2003|By Tom Horton | Tom Horton,SUN STAFF
IT'S LATE spring, Tangier Sound near Crisfield. An old, familiar scene repeats itself along the bay's shallow edges - watermen in their little white "scrapeboats" dragging the eelgrass beds for the year's first shedding soft crabs.
And this year, close by them, something relatively new under the Chesapeake sun - shiny, black bodies - biologists in thick, neoprene wet suits, floating facedown, plunging, porpoising, emerging with fistfuls of glistening green shoots, stuffing precious eelgrass seed into long, trailing white sacks.
It's slow for the watermen. Water's too chilly yet for the crabs to shuck their shells with any gusto, but the scrapers know it's a long season, not over until October.
For the seed harvesters, though, the push is on. A narrow window is all they get, these few weeks during May and June when the eelgrass meadows blossom. Plants send out multiple, flowering shoots, ending in translucent green sheaths that each hold dozens of swelling, golden seeds no larger than a ballpoint pen's tip.
The crabbers are just hoping to collect enough softies to make a living.
The seed crew, nine men and women from the Maryland Department of Natural Resources, is looking to replant one of earth's major sea-grass gardens. "If we are to restore Chesapeake Bay, we must restore its grasses," Ron Franks, secretary of Natural Resources, said in a recent interview.
It's a tall order. For millennia, eelgrass and other species covered hundreds of thousands of acres of the bay bottom. Scientists deduce this from seeds and pollen in sediment cores that let them look back in time.
But since the 1950s, pollution has clouded the water and curtailed the grasses' growing light. By 1978, for the first time in history, grasses covered maybe a tenth of their historical acreage.
The impact on the bay has been harsh - imagine a rapid, 90 percent loss of forest on land. The grasses are vital habitat for crabs and fishes, and food for waterfowl. They dampen wave energy, protecting shorelines from erosion. They settled the sediment and absorbed the nutrients that now cloud bay waters.
Most underappreciated, I think, is the loss of beauty. No dry-land wood or meadow, abloom and greening with spring colors and rife with nesting birds, is finer than a bay grass bed.
To snorkel on a clear day through the dense, waving ribbons of sun-spangled eelgrass, whose smooth, slender blades turn from gleaming emerald to shining black as they age, is to encounter mating blue crabs, diamondback terrapins, striped bass, shrimp and sea horses. The thigh-thick rolls of grass heaved up in the scrapes of soft crabbers fairly throb with the life therein.
In the last five or six years, there has been a convergence of hopeful developments, leading to a virtual mini-boom in reseeding eelgrass, according to biologist Mike Naylor, leader of the DNR crew I accompanied recently.
Bay water quality has edged upward to the point where it should support grasses once again - if seeds are available. The lower Potomac and Patuxent rivers, and eastern bay are candidates.
Scientists have also learned enough about the grasses' requirements for survival to predict spots where restoration should succeed.
Also key, Naylor says, has been the refinement of techniques for harvesting eelgrass seed in the spring, holding it in aquaculture facilities over the summer, and planting it in the fall, when conditions are right for germination.
Decades of experiments to replant eelgrass by putting down mature plants, one at a time, proved expensive and slow. Restoring an eighth-acre was a sizable endeavor. The underwater acreage successfully planted this way, baywide, measures only a few dozen acres.
"With seed, we can broadcast it over the side of a boat, and cover tens of acres vs. eighths of acres," Naylor says.
DNR plans to seek millions of dollars from federal and other sources for a five-year restoration. The goal: 1,000 acres, more than 10 times the total planted baywide to date.
Virginia scientist Robert Orth, who pioneered reseeding of eelgrass, says his teams have restored more than 50 acres in just the past two years in ocean bays east of the Chesapeake.
"If the water quality's there, we're convinced seeding's the way to go," he says.
The stage seems set for serious restoration. Reseeding nowadays are groups including the Army Corps of Engineers, the University of Maryland, the Chesapeake Bay Foundation and the Alliance for the Chesapeake Bay.
But a day with Naylor's DNR crew makes it clear that it's still not easy. The bay water chills, even in a wet suit, and rains have made the bay so murky that crews work almost blind.
Naylor's hoping to get several million seeds this month. Orth in Virginia is hoping for more than Naylor. They have a bet. [No concern exists about collection harming healthy grass beds, since they produce up to 100 million seeds per acre].
But less than 10 percent of seeds collected will germinate. And it takes several hundred thousand seeds per acre, applied over a three- or four-year period, to get full, dense coverage of eelgrass.
Restoration is satisfying - tangible progress after years of decline. It makes us feel needed. After a day in the water, my hat's off to the many state employees and volunteers involved.
