I want that job – Chesapeake Bay Oyster Recovery person
Barbara Mikulski (D-Md.) , Benjamin Cardin (D-Md.), Mark Warner (D-Va.), and Jim Webb (D-Va.), all joined forces to secure $2,000,000 for the oyster recovery program in the Chesapeake Boy.
I’m assuming the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science has something to do with this. From their page:
When Captain John Smith first arrived in the Chesapeake Bay during the early 17th century, he noted such an abundance of oysters that it made it dangerous to navigate his ship. About 100 years later, Francis Louis Michel remarked, “The abundance of oysters is incredible. There are whole banks of them so that the ships must avoid them. They surpass those in England by far in size, indeed they are four times as large.” But five centuries later, the oyster populations are but a fraction of those first seen by Captain Smith.
Now, what you have to understand is this is probably what the Chesapeake Bay looked like in 1650:
Now, for starters, John Smith came to America for one reason only, to make money. Due to misfortune, mismanagement, no governance, and a general lack of common sense, Smith had to leave Jamestown. He decided to stake his fortune on the Chesapeake Bay area. Now, two things compelled Smith to stay there. First of all, he wasn’t welcome back in Jamestown. Secondly, after supposedly shagging Powhatan’s 11 year old daughter, it was probably in his best interest to hang around fairly close since he had no means of leaving the US. So, he needed some means of income. What riches lie along the Chesapeake Bay area? Gold? Nope. Frankincense? Nope. Myrrh? Nope. Look closely at that map and you’ll notice two things real quick ( I hope ):
- There’s no Washington, DC.
- There’s no place for a Washington, DC to be.
And yeah, thirdly, there are no cities at all.
John Smith wasn’t going to make his living as we know it today. He just wasn’t going to get a federal job and place in the burbs of Crystal City. He was going to have to find something to sell, and do it real quick like or the Queen of England would probably not be sending any more ships to America. That would have meant John Smith would most likely have been Pocahontas’s personal toy for life. Not that Pocahontas wasn’t a bad catch as far as natives go. But, you know, there’s more fun things to do with cash. Now, at the time the Chesapeake Bay was pretty much a swamp for the most part. Just not lots there. So, John Smith took the only thing he could find and worked it for he could:
The Elizabethan culture LOVED pearls. They could not possibly get enough pearls. So, lo and behold, the one place John Smith could call his own at the time was just loaded to the gills to the point where you could not get a boat through them with, pearls. Oysters.
Five hundred years later, Chesapeake Bay looks a little different on a map:
Nowadays, there’s more value in the land than in the oysters. On top of that, you’re dumping a metropolis of sewage in it, boats are dumping fuel and oil, people are swimming, and a lot of the coasts is now concrete or fabricated beaches. It’s just not the homey place for oysters quite the way it used to be. In order to make due, the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science proposes using a different breed of oysters to get by. What’s the point of that?
The point I’m getting to is the oysters that are there breed more efficiently than rats. A dude oyster simply floats up close to a babe oyster and squirts his junk at her. She in turn squirts hers back in his general direction. If all goes well the him and her junk bump into each other and float around until a baby oyster is created. There’s no in-vitro or anything that I can tell. All you need is some warm water and a randy couple of oysters. For $2,000,000, I can arrange that. Guaranteed.
