From the Chickens to the Crabs - The Ripple Effect: The Fate of Freshwater in the Twenty-First Century - page 59

CHAPTER 7
From the Chickens to the Crabs
In the Chesapeake Bay, “oysters lay as thick as stones and posed a hazard to nav-
igation.”
—Captain John Smith, 1608
INTERSEX AND DEATH IN THE CHESAPEAKE
If you measure every wrinkle and crenellation around the rim of the Chesapeake Bay,
the shoreline runs ten thousand miles long. By comparison, the California coast extends
eight thousand miles, and the coast of Maine runs for just thirty-five hundred miles. The
Chesapeake is constantly refreshed by two large rivers, the Potomac and Susquehanna,
and by a vast watershed that drains an area stretching across 64,299 square miles, includ-
ing the District of Columbia and parts of six states—West Virginia, Delaware, Maryland,
Virginia, Pennsylvania, and New York. With protected inlets, a shallow depth that av-
erages only twenty-one feet, and a biologically rich mixture of fresh and salt water, the
bay is known for having one of the most prolific fish, oyster, and crab populations in the
world.
But the bay's fantastic natural bounty and prime location ultimately worked against
it. By the start of the twenty-first century, the region had become heavily populated and
polluted, and the bay's aquatic life was spiraling into a steep decline. The Chesapeake's
malaise is not unique, but it is extreme. Because it is such an ideal natural fishery, biolo-
gists point to the bay as a paradigm of how an ecosystem can be affected by many differ-
ent types of pollution, in many ways, which accumulate over many years.
Fish, sensitive to changes in their environment, are excellent “indicator species” that
reflect the overall health of a water system. he World Wide Fund for Nature reports that
fish populations in rivers and lakes have dropped by 30 percent since 1970. This is a big-
ger loss than that of animals in savannas, temperate forests, jungles, or any other sub-
stantial ecosystem. Just as the health of the Chesapeake's fisheries is a clear indicator of
the overall health of the bay's aquasystem, so the state of the bay is a proxy for what is
happening to other water supplies and the creatures who rely on them. We know there
is a grave problem with the water in Chesapeake Bay; the question is how and why this
happened, and what to do about it.