March 25, 2009
Environmental Film Festival Review: Who Killed Crassostrea Virginica?
The Chesapeake oyster is the subject of a documentary at the Environmental Film Festival. Image courtesy of director Michael Fincham
A mass grave lies on the seafloor of the Chesapeake Bay. What was once a living reef of oysters is now hundreds of thousands of shelled caskets, battered by sediment and tides.
It’s been nearly 30 years since the collapse of the Chesapeake Bay oyster fishery, once a main source of commerce for communities there. Fishermen would easily harvest boatloads of the shellfish. They thought the supply was endless.
So what happened? That’s the questions posed by Who Killed Crassostrea Virginica? The Fall and Rise of the Chesapeake Oyster, a documentary that premiered on Friday at Washington D.C.’s Environmental Film Festival. Produced and directed by Michael Fincham, the film shows how the fishery collapse affected watermen and how science is trying to bring the oysters back.
Though a compelling story, one of the film’s weaknesses was its moderate approach to the problem. Fincham depicts the watermen and scientists as allies, whose common purpose is to replenish the Bay with oysters. There may be truth to this, but it neglects a very real controversy. The watermen want to keep up a tradition that died decades ago. Meanwhile, the scientists want the oyster reefs back to restore lost ecosystems.
It was the lack of human versus human conflict that made the film slightly dull. You sit through at least five minutes of an oysterman talking about how beautiful oyster fishing is, complete with historical reenactments of his younger self on a boat, before the film reveals what actually killed the oysters. It wasn’t overfishing, as one might expect, but a parasite from Japan.
Once the audience knows a parasite is the main culprit, Fincham covers the search for its mysterious origin. A bit of suspense is added with the revelation that an oyster biologist who worked in the Chesapeake Bay in the 1960s and 1970s may have accidentally introduced the parasite while studying how well Japanese oysters survive in the bay; those oysters have developed defenses to the parasite and may carry it.
Fincher goes through great pains not to point fingers, keeping the problem entirely ecological. However, it would be naive to think the fishermen don’t blame the scientists to some extent or vice versa, opinions that were left out of the film.
Fincham does deserve credit for trying to tell such a difficult story. The challenge is that there are no concrete answers to what killed the Chesapeake oyster. In addition to the biologist’s accidental introduction, possible origins of the Japanese parasite include early experiments by oyster farmers and the ballast waters from American warships docked in the Bay.
While the film brings in some nice visuals, such as the “ghost warships” and footage showing baby oysters swimming, it doesn’t take advantage of its bizarre cast of characters. Why do the scientists care so much about the state of Chesapeake Bay’s oysters? Do they think the restoration efforts are worth the trouble? As a record of the events and science surrounding the oyster fishery over the past hundred years, the documentary does very well. What it lacked was the ability to answer why this issue is relevant today. We still get oysters, granted from farming or other parts of the world, so why work so hard to grow them in a place teeming in deadly parasites?
Despite the documentary’s problems, it still makes for an informative hour of viewing. Learning how quickly nature can sour, via disease or depleted stocks, is a powerful reminder that an endless ocean is only an illusion.
– Written by Joseph Caputo
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In his online review of “Who Killed Crassostrea virginica: The Fall and Rise of Chesapeake Oysters,” Mr. Caputo offers a number of inaccuracies and distortions about this new documentary. As the writer/producer of the show I accept that a reviewer may not agree with the point of view expressed in the film, but I expect him to base his critique on a responsible reading of the show.
Mr. Caputo blames the film for not blaming commercial watermen as the culprit in killing off oysters on the world’s greatest oyster grounds. “It wasn’t overfishing, as one might expect,” he writes. That’s an odd assertion since the film’s narration states: “According to scientists, overfishing helped kill off oysters in Chesapeake Bay.” An on-screen scientist lays it out this way: “The great reefs have been broken down and scattered by heavy fishing, thousands of acres have been buried by sediment.”
Mr. Caputo also says that scientists want to bring back oysters for their ecological benefits, implying they have no interest in any economic payoff from a restored oyster harvest. Wrong again. If he talked to many of the scientists who actually work on oyster research, he would find they have hopes of reviving a commercial oyster harvest, probably through oyster aquaculture. Their research, after all, has been well funded in large part because the old oyster fishery was important to the economy and culture of so many tidewater fishing towns.
The film’s weakness, according to this review, is “its moderate approach to the problem.” If “moderate” means not piling all the blame for decline on one bad actor, say watermen, then I plead guilty. It is not just overfishing that is killing off oysters, not just sediment, not just pollution, not just disease. The loss of the Chesapeake’s great reefs is a complex tale, a tragedy in which watermen and scientists and oyster farmers all played leading roles. All fell prey to hubris, and over time the great reefs came crashing down.
Human conflict is a key element in story telling, and labeling good guys (scientists) and bad guys (watermen) helps ramp up the conflict. But in this case it would oversimplify a long history and a complicated science story. I always thought good science writing tried to clarify complexity without oversimplifying it.
Here’s the statement that bothered me the most: “Fincher (sic) goes through great pains not to point fingers.” Yet my film clearly identifies overfishing and foreign oysters as key causes for decline. It names the specific scientist who first tried planting Japanese oysters in East Coast waters. And it names and quotes a specific oyster grower who planted them in Chesapeake Bay. It also states that a number of other scientists and oyster growers were experimenting with Japanese oysters. That seems fairly straightforward finger pointing.
Here’s some more finger pointing: My name is misspelled. The Latin species name for the oyster is miscapitalized (it should read virginica, not Virginica). The film does not show a scientist planting Japanese oysters in Chesapeake Bay in the 1960s; instead it shows an oyster grower. Why does he say the film features a “bizarre cast of characters?” Why wasn’t this review edited before being displayed on this web site?
It is a surprise to find such an error-filled review on a site associated with Smithsonian magazine. And it’s disappointing that neither Smithsonian.com nor Mr. Caputo extended the courtesy of notifying me about this article, a courtesy other publications, such as The Washington Post, have displayed. Had I been notified I would have responded much earlier.
Are online blogs exempt from the traditional professional practices of fact checking and proofreading? Perhaps that’s my “moderate approach” popping up again.