THE SILENT THREAT TO THE STRIPED BASS STOCK

Fish need water to live, and striped bass are no exception.

And most of our striped bass are spawned in Chesapeake Bay, a region that is under a new assault from a legion of polluters aided and abetted by the Trump administration.

Geologically speaking, the Chesapeake Bay is the ria, or partially submerged valley, of the Susquehanna River, a 444-mile waterway that is the longest river on the East Coast of the United States.  The Susquehanna’s source lies near Cooperstown, New York, its mouth at Havre de Grace, Maryland.  Along the way, it drains 27,500 square miles of land, including about half of Pennsylvania and smaller portions of New York and Maryland, and provides about 50 percent of the fresh water that enters Chesapeake Bay.

The problem is that much of the water flowing into the Susquehanna, and into other tributaries of the Chesapeake Bay, is far from pristine.  Much of it comes from agricultural regions, and carries loads of excess fertilizers, pesticides and manure.  Some constitutes urban and suburban runoff, contaminated with spilled oil, gasoline and other hydrocarbons, along with various lawn foods, human and pet waste and the turbidity from construction projects.  And as the Susquehanna flows toward the Bay, its own waters are fouled from the same things, and from sewage plants built on its shores.

By the time the river flows into Chesapeake Bay, it brings not only the lifegiving fresh water that makes the Bay the most important spawning and nursery ground for striped bass on the entire coast, but also a host of pollutants that make it more difficult for those striped bass to survive until they are large enough to escape to the sea and join the coastwise migration.

The Chesapeake’s problems are nothing new.  The striped bass stock collapsed in the late 1970s.  In response, the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission released its first striped bass management plan, which noted that

“Striped bass require suitable levels of [dissolved oxygen], salinity and pH for successful spawning, egg development, and hatching and larval and juvenile development.  In addition to these regularly measured parameters of the natural environment, the species requires an environment relatively free of chemical substances which either alter these critical parameters or interfere with the organism’s physiological processes.  Although concentrations on introduced chemicals may be relatively low in the water, these substances can be biomagnified to harmful levels in the striped bass from uptake through the gills or ingestion of contaminated prey.

“Spawning and early life stages occur in watersheds bordered by agricultural areas, urban development or industry.  Point and non-point source pollution by a variety of metals and organic and inorganic chemicals are the result of this development.”

Biologists ultimately determined that such pollution wasn’t the primary cause of the striped bass stock collapse.  However, the Chesapeake Bay Office of the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration notes that

“Overfishing and poor environmental conditions led to the collapse of the fishery in the 1980s, [emphasis added]”

and states that

“A number of environmental challenges in the Chesapeake Bay threaten striped bass, including habitat loss, lack of prey, pollution, hypoxia (low oxygen conditions resulting from warm waters and high nutrient levels), and disease…

“Other threats to striped bass are loss of high-quality habitat areas, poor water quality from urban development and farming in the watershed, and hypoxia.  Striped bass populations respond to a complex interaction of these multiple environmental stresses…”

Hypoxia is mentioned twice in the above quote, and that’s not without reason.  Nutrient runoff, mostly nitrogen and phosphorus that flows downstream from agricultural sources, has literally sucked the air out of the Chesapeake Bay by nurturing huge phytoplankton blooms; each summer, as Bay waters warm and the plankton dies off, large “dead zones” appear, which contain too little oxygen to sustain the fish and other animals that would otherwise thrive in the area.

In 2010, in an effort to reduce and, in time, hopefully eliminate the problem, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency promulgated regulations that, as the agency wrote at the time,

“established the Chesapeake Bay Total Maximum Daily Load (TMDL), a historic and comprehensive ‘pollution diet’ with rigorous accountability measures to initiate sweeping actions to restore clean water in the Chesapeake Bay and the region’s streams, creeks and rivers.”

Naturally, the folks who firmly believe that they’re entitled to let their excess manure and such just wash into ditches, and eventually into the rivers and Bay, didn’t care for the EPA’s actions.  In January 2011, the American Farm bureau Federation sued the ePA, in an effort to protect farmers’ ability to dump crap into ditches and seasonal streams and, ultimately, on anyone and anything that was unfortunate enough to be living downstream.  Builders’ associations, golf courses and other conservation-averse business groups supported the Farm Bureau suit.

The polluters lost in the trial court and also on appeal; their litigation came to an end early in 2016, when the Supreme Court chose not to accept the matter.

However, recent events show that, in the end, the manure dumpers and their allies will probably prevail.  At least for now.

Despite the EPA’s original optimistic language about “a comprehensive ‘pollution diet’ with rigorous accountability measures,” recently released news revealed that neither Pennsylvania nor New York has met its pollution-abatement targets.  In late December, the Bay Journal reported that

“The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency confirmed on Thursday that plans produced by Pennsylvania and New York fall far short of meeting Chesapeake Bay cleanup goals.

“But the agency did not call for any new actions against the states, although their shortfalls—especially Pennsylvania’s huge gap—means the region would miss its 2025 deadline to put in place all actions needed to achieve the Bay’s clean water goals.”

In early January, the EPA seemed to minimize the importance of the states’ failures, when Dana Aunkst, the head of the agency’s Chesapeake Bay Program, dismissed the goals set in 2010 as merely

“an aspiration,”

a statement that seems very much at odds with the EPA’s earlier assurance that there would be “rigorous accountability measures” to assure that states met their pollution abatement goals. 

Lisa Feldt, speaking for the Chesapeake Bay Foundation, observed that the “aspiration” comment was

“a significant step back from the responsibilities of the EPA.  It builds on continuing rollbacks of federal regulations that effect the Chesapeake Bay.”

And it looks like even more, and even bigger, rollbacks are on the way.  President Trump has announced that his administration will repeal another regulation that protected the health and integrity of America’s rivers—and of the Chesapeake Bay—known as the “Waters of the United States rule.”  The New York Times quotes Trump calling the rule, which would prohibit landowners from allowing pollutants to flow off their properties and into public waterways,

“horrible”

and

“destructive.”

In a recent speech to the very same American Farm Bureau Federation that sued in an effort to block rules limiting the flow of pollutants into the Chesapeake Bay, Trump said

“I terminated one of the most ridiculous regulations of all:  the last administration’s disastrous Waters of the United States rule.

“It was a rule that basically took your property away from you.”

Because as we all know, if you can’t let pesticides, fertilizer and manure flow off your land, or clog rivers with sediment from land development projects, there’s no point to own land at all…

As the Times reports,

“The new water rule will remove federal protections from more than half the nation’s wetlands, and hundreds of thousands of small waterways.  That would for the first time in decades allow landowners and property developers to dump pollutants such as pesticides and fertilizers directly into many of those waterways, and to destroy or fill in wetlands for construction projects…

”That could open millions of acres of pristine wetlands to pollution or destruction, and allow chemicals and other pollutants to be discharged into headland waters that eventually drain into larger water bodies, experts in water management said.  Wetlands play key roles in filtering surface water and protecting against floods, while also protecting wildlife habitat.”

Wildlife habitat for, say, newly hatched striped bass, and for juvenile striped bass spending their first year in the Chesapeake Bay, along with the menhaden, river herring and bay anchovies on which bass feed, none of which can survive in hypoxic dead zones.  

As I’ve noted before, it all flows downstream, so when pollutants end up in tiny headwaters, in seasonal streams, or even in man-made drainage ditches that lead into flowing waters, it’s only a matter of time before those pollutants end up in major waterways, where they will impact natural resources that belong to everyone.

They will impact striped bass.

The small bit of good news is that the fight isn’t quite over.  Now it moves to the courts.  The New York Times reported that

“The E.P.A.’s Scientific Advisory Board, a panel of 41 scientists responsible for evaluating the scientific integrity of the agency’s regulations, concluded that the new Trump water rule ignores science by ‘failing to acknowledge watershed systems.’  They found ‘no scientific justification’ for excluding certain bodies of water from protection under the new regulations, concluding that pollutants from those smaller and seasonal bodies of water can still have a significant impact on the health of larger water systems.”

Larger water systems like Chesapeake Bay.  Where most our striped bass are spawned.

So we still can have some hope that the courts will find Trump’s new water pollution rule to be “arbitrary and capricious” and thus invalid.  And if the litigation runs long enough, which it should, we can hope that a new administration, that is willing to act as a steward, rather than as a vandal, of America’s natural resources, will enter the White House, reverse the Trump rule, and protect our fragile waterways.

We don't think of nitrogen fertilizers, or cattle manure, or urban runoff too much when we think about striped bass management.

We should.

Because we can adopt all the fishery management rules that we’d like, and even completely shut down the striped bass fishery for a few years, but if the bass lack clean water where they can spawn, feed and grow, it's all just a waste of time.