becoming exhausted. Despite decreased yields, dredging and tonging went
on, and the s were actually the shippers’ most prosperous decade. Only
when the banks were nearly gone, in the early s, with dredgers absurdly
competing for dregs, did Maryland and Virginia begin to consider regula-
tion. Early in the twentieth century, Maryland tried leasing grounds. Both
state governments favored programs to rebuild oyster banks, but water-
men, dredgers, and tongers alike were uncooperative.
Finfishers were no less greedy and resistant to restraint than the oyster-
men. During the s, for example, the typical harvest of shad from the
Chesapeake was million pounds. By the s it was . million. Crab
populations fared a bit better, but their numbers fell, too. Ironically, by the
time William Warner’s elegiac, Pulitzer Prize–winningBeautiful Swimmers:
Watermen, Crabs, and the Chesapeake Bayappeared in , pure crabmeat
approached the prohibitively expensive.
Meanwhile urban development and suburban sprawl throughout much
of the bay’s immediate vicinity and hundreds of miles into its -million-
square-mile drainage area brought other ills: untreated or ill-treated sew-
age from metropolitan Baltimore, Washington, Richmond, and Norfolk;
oily runoff from millions of autos and trucks; air pollution (including acid
rain); and increased siltation of the bay and its feeder rivers from for-
est clearance and wetland filling, both of these to make new suburbs.
Subaquatic vegetation was sparse and dying. In the decades after World
War II as well, both farmers and suburban gardeners became addicted
to petroleum-based herbicides and pesticides; these, too, washed into the
rivers and the estuary. Then in a particularly deadly ‘‘red tide,’’ a toxic
algae, appeared in a tributary of the Pocomoke on Maryland’s Eastern
Shore. The substance of the tide was quickly identified asPfiesteria pisci-
cida, a recently discovered dinoflagellate that, in one of its many forms,
inflicted brutal lesions on finfish, consumed them, and worse (to us), pro-
duced skin lesions and neurological damage in humans who touched af-
fected water or breathed air from concentrations ofPfiesteria.
Panic ensued as dead fish surfaced in huge numbers. Before November’s
chill winds finally canceled the tide, tourism was stopped cold, virtually all
fishing in the upper bay ceased, and packing plants closed, leaving thou-
sands unemployed. The governor produced a half-million-dollar fund for
study and problem solving, largely, it seems, to calm panic. The fish-killer
tide had certainly been triggered by so-called nutrient-loading: the dump-
ing or leaching of nitrogenous matter into the water. There were any num-
ber of candidates, but the most likely culprit was the ,-odd chicken