Troubled tributary

It looked like just another beautiful day on the water as Bill Dennison and his crew of biologists pushed off from their pier at the Horn Point Laboratory and sailed toward the mouth of the Choptank River. The sun glistened on the waves. In the distance, craggy, tree-lined peninsulas carved the river into jagged coves that have long been home to crabs and rockfish.

But there were hardly any fishing boats. In fact, hardly anyone was on the river at all.
It soon became clear why. The researchers passed large patches of brownish-white foam - so-called "mahogany tides" where the water is so thick with algae that no light can get through. The tides have killed many of the river's once-lush grass beds, depriving crabs of their nursery habitat. The algae have also led to low oxygen levels that have forced the crabs and fish to go elsewhere.

The signs are everywhere: The Choptank is in trouble.

This Eastern Shore river, which meanders along farm fields and past picturesque towns on its way to the Chesapeake Bay, recently ranked as the second-most polluted river in the state. Only the Patapsco, which runs through Baltimore City, was worse.

Dennison, a vice president at the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science, oversaw the rankings. It was with no pleasure that he gave the Choptank a D-minus.

"It has visibly changed," Dennison said, "and now the data support that it has functionally changed."

In the nearly 25 years since Maryland, Pennsylvania and Virginia signed a historic agreement pledging to clean up the Chesapeake Bay and its rivers, the Choptank has not only failed to improve, but, by many measures, it has also gotten worse. The river is being choked by pollution from the region's farms and many new housing developments.

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