Kaine learns about oysters, climate change at VIMS

Sen. Tim Kaine got schooled Monday at the Virginia Institute of Marine Science — a visit he says armed him in his mission to convince others in the U.S. Senate to continue funding critical research.

"Critical environmental research," Kaine, D-Va., said after his two-hour tour of the Gloucester Point campus, "that has helped restore the Virginia oyster, that's helped restore blue crabs and will continue to help in that restoration. It's helping us identify and then hopefully deal with potential climate effects.

"But I'm also learning as a member of the Budget Committee in the Senate the challenges that we pose to this important research when we do things like sequester that dramatically cut research accounts. So I'm armed with some good information to hopefully convince my colleagues that, as we work on the FY16-17 budget, that we shouldn't let sequester hit so significantly."

Sequestration refers to across-the-board spending cuts Congress agreed to implement automatically beginning in 2013 if it failed to come up with a plan to reduce the deficit.

VIMS director John Wells told Kaine that federal funding makes up nearly half of the institute's budget, but that revenue has fallen dramatically in recent years — from both state and federal sources.

At its peak, the state's General Fund provided about $24 million a year, Wells said. In FY2015, that number is expected to be $18.4 million — a nearly $6 million loss that is considered permanent.

The total VIMS budget for FY2015 is $43.9 million. About $21.5 million of that, or 49 percent, is coming from sponsored federal sources such as the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the Department of the Interior and the Environmental Protection Agency that Wells calls increasingly "uncertain."

"The stressful thing about it is the inability to really plan," Well said.

"That's the area where I can be most helpful," Kaine told him. Last year, he was able to use his Budget Committee position to lessen the impact of the sequester, he said, and he hopes to do the same again.

Two-week tour

The Democratic senator's visit was part of a two-week tour of the commonwealth during Congress' summer recess. Earlier in the day, he visited Omega Protein Corporation's menhaden rendering plant in Reedville. The plant is the last one remaining on the Eastern Seaboard.

He is expected to visit Newport News Shipbuilding Apprentice School on Wednesday, and on Thursday the dredge fill facility on Craney Island and a Hampton Roads Chamber of Commerce forum along with fellow Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va.

While at VIMS, Kaine viewed maps and charts detailing projected sea level rise, flood zones and tidal surges throughout Tidewater, part of VIMS's climate change research. Climate models predict the sea level will rise by between 2.5 feet and 5 feet by the end of this century.

Kaine was so impressed with the presentation that he invited the researchers to come to Washington in the fall and present it again to Senate colleagues at their weekly meeting on climate change.

Marine researchers also updated him on the status of blue crabs and oysters, both of them iconic species in the Chesapeake Bay. Fisheries ecologist Rom Lipcius ran through the turbulent recent years of the blue crab stock, which went from a boom of 765 million in 2012 to a bust of 298 million just a year later.

The drop baffled researchers until they identified an unexpected and massive surge in a fish species that's a natural predator of the crab.

"It was a once-in-a-probably-50-year explosion of red drum," Lipcius explained. "And that's what we think took them down."

To a lesser extent, they also suspect other fish predators, as well as higher levels of sediment and nutrients in the water, and loss of the seagrass that young crabs need to avoid predators.

"It's not reasonable to assume the population is collapsing," Lipcius said. "We're suffering from the vagaries of the environment."

They will have a better idea of current stock status once they conduct their November-March winter dredge survey, he said.

Oyster success

Oyster expert Roger Mann presented a far more upbeat picture of oyster restoration, crediting a combined effort not only to increase the population but to rebuild their bottom habitats. He called it a necessary approach using both geology and biology.

"It's clever management as much as anything else," Mann said.

Unlike blue crabs, bay oysters have resurged in the last few years. In 2012 the oyster harvest jumped 60 percent to 409,000 bushels, followed by another 25 percent increase last year to 504,000 bushels — the largest harvest since 1987.

The General Assembly spent about $2 million to build up oyster reefs, Mann said, and for that investment saw a return of more than $22 million in dockside value for last year's harvest.

"So I think we have cause to be optimistic about this stuff at the moment," Mann said.

Gov. Terry McAuliffe is leveraging that success in a new Virginia Oyster Trail tourism campaign touting the bay's oysters and its watermen culture. He announced the effort last week.

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