Oyster Restoration with the Chesapeake Bay Foundation

For Earth Day, I went to the Chesapeake Bay Foundation's Oyster Restoration Center in Shady Side, Maryland, on the West River. There I spent the morning with about 4 dozen volunteers - adults and children - building artificial reef balls to help restore the oysters in the Chesapeake.

The CBF is building concrete reef balls to provide oyster spat - immature oysters - a place to attach and grow. After growing the oysters in tanks at their facility in Shady Side, they carry the young oysters to various oyster sanctuaries where they will hopefully reestablish healthy self-sustaining reefs. Building the 3 to 4 foot balls was hard work - first a set of finished balls had to be extracted by tearing apart their molds. Then the molds had to be cleaned, rebuilt, and filled with a fresh load of cement. Fortunately we had great weather, not too hot, and the entire crew pulled their weight to finish this job, and a few others by lunch.

Depending on various estimates the oyster population has dropped 96% to 99% from its levels in colonial days. The oysters have been decimated by pollution, historic over-fishing, and perhaps most severely by disease. This is unfortunate for the Bay; as oysters feed they filter 60 gallons of water a day removing algae and sediment, and their loss has certainly not helped the water quality of the Bay. The improved water quality would help bay grasses grow, which in turn would help oxygenate the water and improve habitat for fish, crab, and oyster alike.