Departmental Seminars

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Rochelle Seitz introduces:

"Shifting Baselines in Chesapeake Bay" by Vic Kennedy, UMCES

Background:

Dr. Kennedy is a Professor Emeritus at Chesapeake Biological Laboratory. For 38 years, he performed ecological research in Chesapeake Bay and taught graduate students at Horn Point Laboratory before joining CBL. He has published numerous scientific papers in peer-reviewed journals on invertebrate and fish biology. He was a co-editor of a book summarizing our extensive knowledge of oysters, another on blue crabs, and another on ecology and conservation of the diamond-backed terrapin. Dr. Kennedy seeks to understand and describe the environmental history of Chesapeake Bay so that others can appreciate how resource-rich the Bay was when Europeans arrived and how it has been over-exploited since the 19th Century. To that end, he has written Shifting Baselines in the Chesapeake Bay, published in 2018. 

Abstract:

In 1940, H.L. Mencken referred to Chesapeake Bay as "the immense protein factory". In the late 1800s, Virginia and Maryland supplied more oysters each year than any other region in North America and Europe, yielding nearly 20 million bushels in 1885 compared with about 800,000 bushels today. There were over 80 oyster processing plants in Baltimore alone, and others in Maryland and Virginia tidewater cities, employing thousands of shuckers; canners; and oyster can tinsmiths and label makers; and depending on thousands of skipjack sailors and small-boat tongers to land the oysters. The shad and river herring industry captured millions of fish in a 2-month period in spring in the 1800s, using thousands of pound- and gill-nets and miles-long purse seines. That industry was second only to the oyster industry in its economic value; those fisheries are now closed. In the 1800s, waterfowl rafts covered miles of the Bay's surface in winter, providing bountiful harvests for market hunters who used large guns to slaughter hundreds of ducks at one shot, selling their bounty to city markets (and to English royalty); the rafts are now depleted, market hunting is banned, and there are bag limits on hunting. Sturgeon and terrapins were everywhere but were hunted until their harvests were no longer viable; they are now protected. I use eyewitness reports by early colonists as well as historical newspaper articles and federal and state management reports from the 1800s to paint a picture of a cornucopia that we can now only imagine. I conclude by asking how the depletion of these resources might have affected Bay food webs. 

Contact

[[v|jjorth, J.J. Orth]] at (804) 684-7392

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