Humans Are Like Yeast, Chesapeake Edition
As any homebrewer knows, yeast eats sugar and excretes carbon dioxide and alcohol. Then the yeast dies, essentially drowning in its own shit.
Human beings have a similar tendency, and you can see it at work in Maryland, where the crabbing industry may be dead for good:
Crabs have thrived in the bottom muck of the Chesapeake and its tributaries even as centuries of overfishing harmed oysters, fish and other species in the nation’s largest estuary. Now blue crabs are in trouble, too, and when they go, a way of life is sure to go with them.
[snip]
The bay’s blue crab stock is down 70 percent since 1990 due to overfishing and water pollution, according to Virginia and Maryland fisheries managers. The states have imposed steep cuts on this year’s female crab harvest, aiming to reduce the number of crabs taken by more than a third.
The pollution in Chesapeake Bay is pretty awful:
The main culprit is water pollution and soil runoff from development throughout a watershed that is home to 10 million people. Excess nutrients wash into the Chesapeake, causing algae blooms and choking the native plant life that crabs rely on for food and habitat. In the summer, large swaths of the Chesapeake contain so little oxygen that scientists call them “dead zones,” because few critters can live there.
Watermen call it “bad water,” and they track it all summer, following crabs as they skitter to shallower water that contains more oxygen. Even when watermen luck out and pull up a pot full of crabs, long-timers say the crabs are nothing like they used to be.
“Sometimes in the summer, you pull the pots up, they’ve got algae and mud all over them. The bad water comes in and coats everything and the crabs can’t stand it,” Kellam explains.
We’re slightly different from yeast of course: instead of drowning in our own filth, we drown other species instead.
This is the entirely predictable result of too much development and bad land use policies. And while I’d like to have some sympathy for Marylanders over this disaster, they did this to themselves.
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