Here’s something you don’t hear about every day: good news about the Chesapeake Bay. The Washington Post is reporting that an artificial reef in a tributary is teeming with new life. The reef is nothing more complex than a large pile of shells. Historically reefs like that were so numerous they were a hazard for ships. So many oysters lived in the Chesapeake that they filtered all the water in the bay every few days.
The demise of the Chesapeake oyster came around the turn of the last century through a manic and violent harvest that reduced the population to just one percent of historic abundance in less than a century. As many as 15 million oysters were harvested annually in the late 1800’s, compared to 100,000 or less today.
Scores of people died in the mad pursuit of oysters. Maryland was forced to establish the Oyster Police to protect its oystermen against their counterparts from Virginia. Violent conflicts between watermen from the two states became so common that this era is now known as the Oyster Wars.