Millennial scale sustainability of the Chesapeake Bay Native American oyster fishery
Significance Oysters are important organisms in estuaries around the world, influencing water quality, constructing habitat, and providing food for humans and wildlife. Following over a century of overfishing, pollution, disease, and habitat degradation, oyster populations in the Chesapeake Bay and elsewhere have declined dramatically. Despite providing food for humans for millennia, we know little about Chesapeake Bay oyster populations prior to historical fishing in the late 1800s. Using fossil, archaeological, and modern biological data, we reconstruct changes in oyster size from the Pleistocene and prior to human harvest through prehistoric Native American occupation and modern times. These data demonstrate sustainability in the Native American oyster fishery, providing insight into the future management of oysters in the Chesapeake Bay and around the world. Estuaries around the world are in a state of decline following decades or more of overfishing, pollution, and climate change. Oysters (Ostreidae) ecosystem engineers in many estuaries, influence water quality, construct habitat, and provide food for humans and wildlife. In North America's Chesapeake Bay, once thriving eastern oyster (Crassostrea virginica) populations have declined dramatically, making their restoration and conservation extremely challenging. Here we present data on oyster size and human harvest from Chesapeake Bay archaeological sites spanning ~3,500 y of Native American, colonial, and historical occupation. We compare oysters from archaeological sites with Pleistocene oyster reefs that existed before human harvest, modern oyster reefs, and other records of human oyster harvest from around the world. Native American fisheries were focused on nearshore oysters and were likely harvested at a rate that was sustainable over centuries to millennia, despite changing Holocene climatic conditions and sea level rise. These data document resilience in oyster populations under long term Native American harvest, sea level rise, and climate change; provide context for managing modern oyster fisheries in the Chesapeake Bay and elsewhere around the world; and demonstrate an interdisciplinary approach that can be applied broadly to other fisheries.
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences