![]() ![]() Soon there is a “chain reaction of spawning, which sweeps across the oyster beds, turning the water milky white with millions of eggs and with clouds of sperm,” said Alice Jane Lippson and Robert Lippson in “Life in the Chesapeake Bay.”Īll the while, you are sipping a beer and eating a picnic lunch above! Oyster moms and dads on reefs everywhere spawn in early summer and warming water temperatures stimulate males and females to release their sperm and eggs into the water. If you are out on a boat this weekend, picture this scene in the life and times of oysters taking place in the water below you. There are many other shell recycling programs - look for one near you at /shell-recycling-alliance.While we are sitting here enjoying a July 4th holiday weekend, oysters are hard at work in the Lynnhaven River and beyond, making baby oysters to keep the waterways clean. The program is now the largest shell recycling network in the nation and with hundreds of participating restaurants, wholesalers and drop off sites, it’s becoming possible to eat your way to a healthier Bay! It's going to take probably billions and billions of oysters, but today's planting is the first step in that direction. The oyster is one thing we can do to begin to filter the waters. So it’s not just the filtration capacity of the oysters it’s all the organisms that wouldn’t be there if the oysters weren’t there. Oysters are the equivalent in Chesapeake Bay of hard corals down in the tropics.They create the hard bottom that an oyster ecosystem is dependent upon. And now, the shells from these oysters are valuable too, for restoration. So where do the oysters that people still enjoy around here come from? Mostly from oyster farms that do good business providing the now-valuable delicacy. Shipping by rail, and they’re emptying the Chesapeake oyster.īecause of this historic over-harvesting, as well as changing water quality and disease, wild oyster harvests here are down to as low as 1% of historic numbers. Entire towns were built on oyster shell and their economy was harvesting the oyster. And so many oysters were pulled out of the bay that their shells were almost literally cheap as dirt.Īnd you saw mountains of shell, and those mountains could have been 100 feet high for all I know. They grew in reefs big enough to be obstacles to boats and became one of the crops that defined the area. Not so long ago the Chesapeake overflowed with oysters. A shell can hold up to 10 baby oysters - that’s a lot of new wild oysters from one farm raised half shell. Shells are then taken to the University of Maryland’s oyster hatchery at Horn Point, where they are aged in the sun for up to two years to limit the chance of introducing invasive organisms. Pickups happen every one or two weeks from restaurants and there are even sites where anyone can drop off their own shells. They come in twice a week, take all of our shells,it goes back into the Bay. All of our shells go into the Chesapeake Recovery, or Bay Recovery Program. So we go through four to six thousand oysters in a week. That’s what the Oyster Recovery Partnerships’, shell recycling alliance does. It needs a hard place to attach to call it home.Īll it takes is for someone to pick up the shells that would be thrown away. You drop a spat into that, it will suffocate. You drop a spat into that, on the bottom of the bay, almost anywhere, it’s mud. If you drop a spat into the bay, almost anywhere, it's mud. The oyster spat, live and grow by filtering water. In fact, one full grown oyster can filter fifty gallons of water every day!īut before they can do that, free swimming baby oyster larvae, need a hard surface to grow on, so they can become spat - the stage of life where they begin growing a shell. They filter out impurities like excess nitrogen and phosphorus. If you think of the Bay as an organism, oysters are kind of like the kidneys. It’s part of a far-reaching plan to restore the health of the Chesapeake Bay by repurposing the shells that might have once been thrown away to carry the next generations of native oysters. But it didn’t pull them out of the water - in fact, it’s dumping them in. Just up the Chesapeake Bay, on the Severn River, this boat is carrying 50 million baby oysters. But in places like here in Washington DC, some oyster shells go on to play an important conservation role after the oysters get eaten. ![]() When you eat an oyster on the half shell, you’d be excused if you didn’t think much about the shell.
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