Asian oysters will not be introduced into the Chesapeake Bay to help restore ailing oyster populations, federal and state officials ruled Monday.
The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and officials from Maryland and Virginia rejected using Asian oysters to rebuild the aquatic sea life because of the ecological risks and cost of their upkeep.
“The prudent thing to do would be to focus on native oysters,” said Donald Boesch, president of the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science and research leader advising Maryland.
The corps spent $17 million over five years on more than 30 projects studying the potential success of placing Asian oysters in the Bay.
Asian oysters from previous experiments will be removed in the next four to six weeks.
Boesch said the advantages of housing the Asian oysters were “not that great to warrant risk of adverse affects.”
Some environmentalists fear that the Asian oysters would overtake and crowd out the native population.
Although Asian oysters grow faster and fight disease better than the oysters that are native to the Bay, Boesch said that the Asian variety would be more expensive because of the special facilities and security that are needed to contain them.
Officials at the end of the process never seriously considered introducing Asian oysters into the Bay, Boesch said.
“The difference in the debates over the states weren’t about them being introduced, but about expanding aquaculture using sterile animals in the Bay,” he said.
“The focus of the last seven years was more on economics than on ecology,” said L. Preston Bryant Jr., Virginia secretary of natural resources.
The Army Corps and the two states now will focus on restoring native oysters, while “leaving a crack open for tightly controlled small-scaled scientific experiments,” said Lynda Tran, spokeswoman for Virginia Gov. Tim Kaine.
Restoring the native oyster fishery will cost $50 million a year over 10 years, though Bryant said that would “only give us a fighting chance.”
Though the current native oyster population is less than 1 percent of what it was 50 years ago, there are “pockets of success in many areas of the Bay and its tidal tributaries,” Bryant said.
