It's the season for cow-nose rays, the perennial predator that scientists and restoration managers love to hate. The rays swoop in from points north this time of year and began to munch their way across the bay, eating oysters, scallops, and everything else they can put away.  Just ask the Army Corps of Engineers, which lost nearly a million oysters during an ill-fated planting in 2004; or the Chesapeake Bay Foundation, whose oysters met a similar fate when they planted 750,000 of them not far from Stingray Point in the Piankatank River .

Now comes an alternative weekly in Virginia floating an old chestnut: let's eat the rays!  If only we created a market for these things, we could keep them in check and they wouldn't proliferate. 

Over the years, chefs have tried many different ways of making ray palatable. Some stuffed it with squid, others served it in soup or ground it for pasta filling. It tastes, they say, like beef.  I'll take their word for it.

But Karl Blankenship's Bay Journal article this month quotes experts who say creating a ray fishery won't solve the problem.

"A cownose ray fishery may not be the best answer,” the Bay Foundation's Tommy Leggett tells the paper. “Maybe the best answer is the restoration strategy using spat on shell. Rays have always been around, and they certainly didn’t devastate oyster reefs way back when—but then, our oysters grew in a reefy structure where rays couldn’t do harm to the oyster.”

A few months back, oyster restoration folks had a lot of fun with an AP story that came out announcing a new restoration technique called "spat-on-shell." The fact is, Maryland has been putting oysters on shells - in part to help them grow better and in part to protect them from predators- for more than a decade. We have lost much of our reef structure, but another reason for the rays may be a lack of predators because we are over-fishing sharks. See, it all goes back to food.

At any rate, I personally won't be ordering up a plate of Ray Marsala for lunch. I'm going to stick with the real chicken of the sea-salad bar tuna.