Underwater Grasses

The underwater grasses that sustain fish and crabs in the Chesapeake Bay expanded by 6 percent last year, reversing a two-year decline in one of the key indicators of the bay's health.The 3,500-acre growth of bay grasses, reported yesterday by the Environmental Protection Agency's bay program office, was a welcome surprise because it occurred despite storms that flooded the Chesapeake with record flows of fresh water.Biologists had blamed spring flooding in 1994 and 1995 for declines in underwater grasses during those years.

The Chesapeake Bay's underwater grasses decreased 7 percent in 2010, according to a report released Thursday by the Chesapeake Bay Program. The aerial survey by the Virginia Institute of Marine Science found grasses covered 79,675 acres of the bay and tidal rivers, down from 85,914 acres in 2009. Despite the decline, scientists said, it is the third-highest baywide acreage estimate since 1984. The grasses are a measure of bay health because the plants serve as food and habitat, absorb excess nutrients and reduce shoreline erosion, the program said.

In Stephen Ailstock's galley-style lab, the grass grows in water-filled test tubes, beakers and Mason jars. Under fluorescent light, tens of thousands of plantings sprout in graceful curves, flowery bunches and straight stalks. In controlled laboratory conditions, the Anne Arundel Community College biology professor has devised a way to grow mass quantities of the ecologically prized but scarce aquatic grasses that provide food, shelter and erosion buffers in the Chesapeake Bay. Now, Ailstock's challenge is to move beyond his cramped lab to Poplar Island, where he and his students will try to restore the underwater meadows that once thrived near the land mass two miles out in the bay near Tilghman Island.

The effort to restore the Chesapeake Bay will expand to include cleaning up the bay's rivers and restoring its underwater grasses when region officials meet Wednesday in Annapolis.Officials from Maryland, Pennsylvania, Virginia, the District of Columbia and the federal government plan to sign a seven-point agreement that calls for restoring water quality in the bay's 10 major tributaries, where most of the estuary's fish feed and spawn. A draft of the agreement was obtained by The Sun.Officials also will pledge to restore the bay's underwater grasses, vital fish habitat which have been slowly returning since they all but vanished in the early 1980s.

The health of the Chesapeake Bay didn't get any better in the past year, but it didn't get worse, either, according to the Chesapeake Bay Foundation. Crab harvests have dropped sharply and the water has gotten murkier, but the rapid loss of wetlands, which filter pollutants from the water, has been stemmed and the shad population has increased, the foundation said yesterday in its annual State of the Bay report. The foundation gave the bay a score of 28, on a scale in which 100 is the pristine quality described by the English explorer Capt.

Stands of underwater grasses are sprouting this year along Anne Arundel County waterways, some of them appearing in mid-Chesapeake Bay rivers for the first time in more than 10 years.This new growth means efforts to reduce pollution and clean the rivers feeding the bay are working, said William Matuszeski, director of the Chesapeake Bay Program Office in Annapolis."By implication, the water quality has improved," said Steve Funderburk, a biologist with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.The grasses are valuable as habitat for insects and fish.

With oyster harvests at a historic low and underwater grasses dying, the Chesapeake Bay remains in dismal condition, despite steps to reduce pollution from sewage treatment plants, according to the annual "State of the Bay" report by the Chesapeake Bay Foundation. "The Chesapeake Bay is routinely described as a national treasure. But the governments' program to save the bay is fast becoming a national disgrace," said William C. Baker, president of the Annapolis-based nonprofit organization.

The Chesapeake Bay is at a critical point in its 10,000-year history. The actions taken today and the commitments made as we enter the next millennium will determine whether the bay will live or die.To put this in perspective, it is important to understand the bay's history. It was created when the last ice age receded and ocean levels rose, flooding the old Susquehanna River valley. The bay's first 9,700 years were largely free from pollution, with too little human settlement to cause any detrimental impact on the vast 64,000-square- mile watershed and the 200-mile main stem.

WASHINGTON -- Pointing to signs that Chesapeake Bay is making at least a partial recovery from decades of pollution, state and federal officials said yesterday they plan to shift their efforts now toward restoring water quality and fish in the rivers that feed into the bay.In a Capitol Hill briefing for Maryland's congressional delegation, state Environment Secretary Robert Perciasepe said that while the interstate cleanup effort to date has focused on...

Maryland has approved the expansion of a marina at th mouth of a small tidal creek in Cecil County, despite the finding of a Johns Hopkins University scientist that the creek bottom may be home to rare Chesapeake Bay grasses.The marina project on Scotchman Creek was scaled back in response to concerns about dredging and boat traffic raised by Cecil residents, said Richard Ayella, chief of wetland permits for the state Department of Natural Resources.Losten Marina will be allowed to dredge only about two acres of creek bottom to add 40 boat slips, under the plan approved recently by the state Board of Public Works.