Oyster Recovery Partnership marks 30 years of restoration, sets sights on future goals - 47abc - WMDT

17 hours ago

ANNAPOLIS, Md. – Over the last 30 years, the Oyster Recovery Partnership (ORP) has been hard at work.

Major Milestone

Their mission: to revitalize habitats and populations for the shelled creatures in the Chesapeake Bay. In 1994, a group of scientists, watermen, and the public got together to tackel those goals.

"It started with the slow demise of oyster populations in Maryland," said ORP Executive Director, Ward Slacum. "The beginning of this was really designed to try to figure out how we can recover the species."

It took experimentation and learning, and trial and error, Slacum says. However, since work began, the ORP has helped to plant more than 11.5 billion oysters in the Bay.

"We were really able to start building that capactiy to produce millions of oysters, and then billions of oysters, on annual basis," Slacum said.

What the ORP Does

Oyster plantings are one of the biggest ways that the ORP supports Bay health. The group will often team up with watermen to distribute millions of baby oysters, or spat, into the Bay and its tributaries.

While the spat is still in larvael form, they attach themselves to a hard surface, usually a fully-grown oyster, and start to grow. However, the babies aren't the only stars of the effort; shells are the second big piece to the puzzle.

The ORP's oyster shell recycling program has helped to restore about 310,000 pounds of shells in the water. Slacum says the ORP works with restaurants and the public to collect the shells, which are then brought to the University of Maryland's Horn Point laboratory in Dorchester County.

From there, the shells are used to spawn new life. Baby oysters are hatched in the lab, and then introduced to the Bay. And, since the creatures' reefs are made from their own shells, they naturally tend to settle on them, says Slacum.

"They go to sanctuaries where they have a home, and are going down in areas that have already been evaluated [for need]," said Slacum.

While oysters are tasty, this work is vitally important for the overall health of the Bay.

"The oyster population of the Upper Chesapeake, in particulr, is so depleted that there's no way we could just build reefs and kind of hope that the oysters will find them on their own," said Stephanie Westby, Oyster Restoration Program Director for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

A Special Species

Oysters are a keystone species in the Bay, and boost the estuary's health in a number of ways.

"As they are sitting there on the bottom, feeding, they're pulling out pollutants from our waterway, and they can make the water more clear." That's important for aquatic grasses, says Westby, as "They need sunlight to grow. When the water is murky, it blocks the sunlight, and the grasses can't grow. That, in turn, means those grasses won't be putting oxygen in to the Chesapeake Bay."

Westby also explains that oysters help to remove excess nutrients, like nitrogen and phosphorous, which prevents algael blooms. While the blooms do feed on the nutrients and initially produce oxygen, Westby says a new set of problems come up when they die and sink.

"When they're down at the bottom, they decompose, and the chemical process of decomposition requires [the already depleted levels of] oxygen," Westby said.

Not only are oysters important for water health; they also provide critical habitats for other scpecies, like blue crab and certain types of fish. Restoring oyster reefs also helps spawn natural grown over time, Westby says.

"They're ecosystem engineers. The generations of healthy systems will build on top of each other," Westby said. "When we build these reefs, we hope that they will sustain in reproduction in the long term, but also that they will export juvenile oysters to other reefs."

By Land and Sea

The effort to protect oysters, and the Chesapeake Bay as a whole, will require work in the water, as well as on land.

Westby says best management practices, like planting buffer crops around agricultural areas, is a huge benefit to the entire operation.

"We want to bring back more oysters to increase that capacity for the Bay to cleanse itself," Westby said. "At the same time, we need to be keeping [excess nutrients] out of the water in the first place."

Looking Ahead

And, with the ORP's 30th anniversary, comes another special milestone just in reach. The ORP is on the verge of meeting its goal to restore oysters in ten tributaries in Maryland and Virginia.

Some of that restoration work is currently underway in the Manokin River. Work has already been completed in Harris Creek, the little Choptank, Tred Avon, and St. Mary's Rivers. The ORP is on track to meet their goal in 2025.

"About 5 billion of those have been put in in the last ten years," Slacum said. "Our goal now is to take that capability and continue on that, and double that."

Westby says in order to achieve future goals, support from federal groups, like the Chesapeake Bay Program, will be crucial.

"It's exciting. It is generally touted as the world's largest oyster restoration project, collectively," Westby said. "We absolutely would not be succeeding without the help of the Oyster Recovery Partnership."