Dead Fish

A couple of month's ago I went sailing in Chesapeake Bay. For anyone who hasn't sailed there, it's a beautiful, protected sail area bordered by a green and leafy coastline. OK that's the nice bit. The not so nice bit is the dead fish.

It was early August and very hot. Not a lot of breeze so we were motoring. On our way back to Annapolis, we saw a big dead fish floating on the surface. At first we thought maybe some aquamoron in a cigarette-boat had whacked it near the surface. Then we saw another one. Then another one. In fact we probably saw a big bloated dead fish every hundred yards or so.

I did a bit of digging around. Here's the Chesapeake Bay Foundation's web site had to say.

"The Chesapeake Bay’s “dead zone,” stretching for hundreds of square miles during the summer, has too little oxygen to support a healthy ecosystem.  Though you can’t see it as you drive across the Chesapeake Bay Bridge outside of Annapolis, or across the Rappahannock River on Route 3, the “dead zone” has a devastating impact on the creatures living in the Bay and its tributaries.

Like animals on land, nearly all of the Chesapeake Bay’s aquatic life, from worms and crabs on the bottom, to perch and striped bass above and underwater grasses in between, depend on oxygen to survive. Low dissolved oxygen (DO) levels, called hypoxia, can impair growth and reproduction and stress living resources, making them vulnerable to disease.  Water with no oxygen, called anoxic, will kill most aquatic animals."More

Basically the run-off from sewage treatment plants and farms further upstream is fertilizing algae in the Bay. When these algae die, they sink to the bottom and take up oxygen from the water. Less oxygen, less for the fish so fish die. 

In June 2000, the State of Maryland instituted a law to get the offenders to clean up. Sadly it doesn't seem to be making much difference. In fact it seems to getting worse.

We can help by joining the Chesapeake Bay Society