Shucking open a tale A little local (science) history about Maryland’s favorite mollusk
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ou can see a whole world in an oyster. (And by that, I don’t mean a perfectly milled pearl.) Just ask those who have made extraordinary claims, often competing ones, about Crassostrea virginica, the prized Eastern oyster—a culinary gem that once encrusted the entire bottom of the Chesapeake Bay. For the watermen whose livelihoods have risen and fallen with it, the oyster has become the slimy symbol of the bay’s ongoing decline and their sad fortunes. For environmentalists, the humble bivalve embodies perhaps the last chance to filter out tons of the harmful “nutrients” that come along with booming populations and large-scale shoreside agriculture. And for elected officials who have vacillated between bending over backwards for watermen or rolling over for corporate dredging-andleasing interests, the oyster has provided a centurieslong conundrum: How much political capital can I expend (or gain) by coming down on one side or the other? The Oyster In the past century or more, Christine Keiner, Question: Scientists, A&S ’01 (PhD), writes in The Oyster Question, all Watermen, and the churning currents surrounding the oyster—the the Maryland gustatory oyster, the economic-engine oyster, the Chesapeake Bay political oyster—have hardly done it any favors. since 1880, by The bay now yields about 1 percent of the 15 milChristine Keiner lion bushels it did annually around 1885. The phe(344 pages, nomenon is not limited to the bay. Worldwide, 85 University of percent of natural oyster reefs are gone. Those that Georgia Press, remain are about 10 percent as productive as they $44.95) were during their historic peaks. To invoke the mollusk today entails a sigh and a shrug as much as a smacking of the lips. Keiner, who investigated the machinations surrounding the oyster as ballast for her dissertation, comprehensively charts the course of its decline. From cannon-fueled wars between oystering boats in the 1880s; to a state districting system that endowed watermen early on with too much political power, encouraging overfishing; to bat44 Johns Hopkins Magazine • Summer 2011
tles between large-scale dredging operations and traditional hand-tongers (who decried those who would more completely exploit “the commons” of the bay’s bottom); to the melancholy surrounding the industry today, Keiner unstrings a yarn that is by turns bizarre, jaw-dropping, and maddening. While her painstaking book lacks the spark and sprawl of Mark Kurlansky’s 2006 opus, The Big Oyster: History on the Half Shell, which utilized the oyster as a prism through which to explore New York’s economic and social history, it gets at the questions oyster lovers have long asked: Why is it so hard for the oyster to stay healthy and reproduce? Why hasn’t science devised a way to turn its fortunes around? Keiner also captures just how central the oyster became to the region’s cultural and economic identity, spurring new rail lines and canning industries, and encouraging health and ecological improvements. Baltimore became the first American city to build a wastewater treatment plant, not because of water quality concerns, she notes, “but to protect the lucrative oyster trade from sewage contamination.” Woven throughout Keiner’s historiography is the Crassostrea-centric work of three Johns Hopkins giants who introduced the voice of science into the ongoing what-shall-be-done debate over the oyster, and maintained it for decades. In doing so, they furthered the university’s interest not only in highlighting its research locally, but aiding the state economy. One of them, William K. Brooks, a late 19th-century biology professor, investigated ways to artificially reproduce oysters, and argued in favor of turning over large chunks of the bay bottom to the seaside equivalent of the mechanized agriculture that had reshaped the North: corporate interests and small-time operators with incentive to tend to the beds and reefs. Two others—Abel Wolman, Engr ’15, known globally as the godfather of water purification, and Isaiah Bowman, a geography professor—made similar arguments later (as did a young environmental journalist, Rachel Carson, A&S ’32, during the 1930s). None of them got what they wanted—to the delight of oystermen, who long and viciously fought privatization of the bay. The Hopkins trio was certainly well intentioned, Keiner implies, but they probably were wrong about what could save the oyster. She points to another embattled concept—climate change—as a possible culprit for the bivalve’s ongoing demise. As warmer waters made their way up the bay, so did the viruses that killed or stunted the oyster’s growth. By the 1980s, the plummeting catch had turned oystermen into crabbers, charter boat captains, and prison