The Chesapeake Bay breathe out oysters

The Chesapeake Bay breathe out oysters

Ben Seal for reasons to be happy

The Chesapeake Bay breathe out oysters

The Chesapeake Bay breathe out oysters

It would be a calm and peaceful morning on the edge of the Choppank River in Cambridge, Maryland, if not the forklift, which scratch the pier and scratched 5-foot-high metal cages while they were going. It is in early May and the sun is just starting to burn the middle in the morning, but the crew has been there since dawn. Everyone is supplied with energy despite the early start, and that's rightly because the cages are with a new home with oysters. This is the largest day of reef restoration that Chesapeake Bay has ever seen.

A crane lifts the cages from eight tanks that have dipped in the river, where millions of baby osters – as they are known – spent the right shell last week. One by one, a total of 200, the cages are covered with a conveyor belt and unloaded in a sudden noise. In the belt they climb when they are loaded onto the J. Millard Tawes for transport. In its past life, the ship served as an icebreaker and buoy tender, but today it will carry these mollusks for 70 nautical miles to the Manokin River to the south, where they breathe life into the bay again. Reasons to be happy look at the story and the return of oysters to the Chesapeake region.

In the early 1900s, the oyster shells in sharpening houses in this region were stacked high. Each represented a piece of reef, which quickly deteriorated the aquatic environment. In the Maryland part of the bay alone, an estimated 15 million bushes were harvested annually to meet demand. With a helping hand from the nutrient pollution and two floating diseases from the middle of the century, excessive harvesting the oyster population and the natural habitat that the mussels have formed. Until 2011, the population in the bay was estimated at less than 1% of the historical level.

A worker holds a shovel next to a conveyor belt on which oysters are brought to the J. Millard Tawes.
Ben Seal for reasons to be happy

The mountain of the mussels, which is now forming on the deck of the J. Millard Tawes, could be similar to the bunch that was thrown away in oysters a century ago, but his goal is to reverse this complicated story. The decades of $ 100 million initiative, led by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and this year for completion, is the world's largest restoration of oysters. According to Olivia Caretti, the Coastal Restoration Program Manager for the Oyster Recovery Partnership, a non -profit organization that leads the preservation of the locals in the Chesapeake, it serves as a global model – the “gold standard” – the “gold standard”. This morning she ensures that all of these oysters will safely complete her trip that started in March when she ended up at the nearby Horn Point Oyster breeding, and will end when you settle on reefs in the water of manocin.

The river is one of 10 Chesapeake flows that aim at the project, and its 450 hectares restored reef would only exceed any other company. Today 23 million spit is planted in the river to join the matter. The ship saws under its weight, so that his captain briefly asks whether it is hit below. It is the greatest planting of the team to date, and donuts are fine as part of the celebration.

A large boat called that used to be an icebreaker who calls J. Millard Tawes named J. Millard Tawes is now transporting oysters.
Ben Seal for reasons to be happy

“In this era of climate change and environmental deterioration, this is a rare success story,” says Stephanie Westby, NOAA program manager of Oyster Reef. “We have about 1,700 acres of healthy oysters who were not there before.”

During most of the history of human history, the Chesapeake Bay, America's largest mouth, was a flourishing water ecosystem, and oysters were a keystone species. In the colonial period, they were reported so abundantly that their reefs penetrated the water surface and represented a risk of navigation for ships through the bay. For centuries, all of these oysters have supported the health of the bay through their nature.

Close up of baby oxen, called spit, attached to mussels.
Ben Seal for reasons to be happy

By filtering water, the oysters allowed underwater grasses to absorb the sunlight they needed to offer countless fish and the beloved blue crabs of the bay habitat. By eating microscopic plankton, they played a crucial role in the food network and collected energy that could be passed on to other marine life. By drawing nitrogen and phosphorus from the water column, they helped prevent algae flowers and hypoxic dead zones, which sometimes follow. And through conglomeration into reefs, they brought stability and a welcome habitat for their neighbors in the bay.

For a long time, the efforts to revive these valuable contributions to the health of the ecosystem were “scatter”, says Westby. It was “half the morning here or there, maybe two or three, if we really rocked it.” When the Obama government gave an executive regulation on the protection and restoration of the bay in 2009, it was a “change of sea,” she says. The cooperation between state and federal authorities, scientists and environmental organizations turned into higher equipment. In 2014, the Chesapeake Bay water catchment area closed a regional compact to restore 10 tributaries by 2025.

“We set this massive, hairy, bold goal,” says Westby, “and we didn't even know what that meant. We only knew that we wanted to grow up.”

When the project started, the existing reefs of the bay had decreased to just over 500 acres. By the end of 2024, this number had more than quadrupled. When the plantings are completed this year, the total amount will be close to 2,500.

Noaa uses nautical diagrams, sonar and bathymetry -the examination of the U -boot topography -to identify segments of the bay that can maintain rejuvenation. In the best cases, as today, oysters are sown on existing reefs that have been worsened. In other cases in which the Hard River Bottom is exposed, but there is no reef in sight, the partners of the project build a new substrate, either from stone or the shell to which oysters born in the bay can of course attach. Westby calls the model “Create and you will come”. In the most exhausted parts, decades of drainage and soft sediments have created into the bay from its expansive water sheath, which Boze Hancock, the Senior Marine Habitat Restoration Scientist of Nature Conservancy, referred to as the “monoculture of the mud”. There the crews have to build a substrate and sow oysters with young people that are produced in the breeding.

Manager Stephanie Alexander has been bubbling over the big day in the breeding egg, which is part of the Center for Environmental Sciences at the University of Maryland. In order to achieve this point, she and her employees brought a breeding stock in January – pulled out of the waters in which their descendants are planted – and warm their water gently to stir them before hibernation. After spawning in the early spring, their larvae received a constant diet with algae and phytoplankton in 10,000-gallon tanks until they were ripe enough to be filtered out of the water, to be packed in 5 million bundle and brought to pier to get involved in the recycled mussels, which they call at home.

Millions of mussels have a short trip from the breeding egg. They were gathered from restaurants and houses on the east coast, and many of them were harvested from the bay themselves. Riffroric production brings your circle.

Shelves of colorful green and brown algae and phytoplankton that are fed to the oyster larvae.
Ben Seal for reasons to be happy

“We want the oyster to thrive in the bay,” says Alexander. “If we can get these sanctuaries [established]You will harvest others like wild fishing. So it is a positive feedback loop. “

A Maryland inventory in May showed that the number of adult oysters in the state part of the bay has almost doubled since the beginning of the Noaa project, even if the harvest has started to surpass 400,000 bushes -rarely observed a level in the past 30 years. In Virginia, where the harvest of the middle of the century brought in 4 million bushes, but fell up to 20,000 in the nineties, the harvest has decreased to more than 700,000. The advantages of healthy oysters also extend to other fisheries, including white perch and stripper, which hide from predators in the crevices of the reefs. A NOAA study showed that youthful blue crabs are three to four times as likely that they survive on the sandy ground on a reef, and a study by Morgan State University estimated that a fully mature reef in the chesapeake would lead to an increase in the Blue Crab harvest by 150%.

As head of the Shellfish Management department of the Virginia Marine Resources Commission, the approval agency for the restoration, Adam Kenyon hopes that reefs revive the bay ecosystem and revive the local economy that has developed next to them.

“It is deeply rooted in this area in this area,” says Kenyon. “They have these shared apartments on the water, which are not only based on oysters [when populations declined]And these communities suffered afterwards. This infrastructure was never really rebuilt, and these coastal communities still feel. “

Although the Chesapeak initiative has concrete human advantages, Hancock is a strong strength to show the world that the return of oysters is much more than our own interests.

“Working in Chesapeake Bay was really zero to realize that oysters are not just fishing,” he says. “The critical piece is the habitat that the oysters build. It is the reef.”

A towering bunch of recycled oyster shells.
Ben Seal for reasons to be happy

Hancock, who has been working in the renowned restoring of the coastal life department for 25 years, has welcomed numerous visitors to the Chesapeake region to show them the progress of Noaa and its partners, including Nature Conservancy, in the past decade. He visited groups from China, Hong Kong, Australia, New Zealand, Germany, the Netherlands, England and Scotland, he says and observed how the lights continue in the heads of the conservationists. It is one thing to read in scientific publications about the restoration of the reefs, but it is able to be able to see it, touch and smell it, “brings the imagination to the Richthof, which could be possible elsewhere.” It is magic, “he says.

For Australia, the Chesapeake served as an inspiration to restore 60 shellfish reversals, and it was influential in the effort to establish oysters on wind farms in the North Sea, says Hancock. Since the project has created a fertile soil on which the other can build up its own restoration initiatives, he adds that it reveals two important lessons to expand this work. First, the scale is not only possible, but also important in order to be “ecologically relevant”. Second, a broad and committed partnership is needed to be done correctly.

“This work is too great for one person, for an organization. It has to be a collaboration,” says Hancock. “It took hundreds of fishing boats who worked every day and are available for hundreds of years to reduce the resource. Reset is not overnight.”

This story Was from Reasons to be happy and checked and distributed by Forklift.

Leave a comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *