My name is Mike Naylor. I'm with the Maryland Department of Natural Resources and I'm the
Shellfish Program Manager. What we're mostly going to be doing is creating hard substrate
for oysters to settle upon. We want to know if people who live along this creek and work
along this creek can handle the project that we're doing. Harris Creek has more mud than
is really healthy for the creek. We need to take some of these mud habitats that used
to be oyster bars and restore oysters to them. So we're going to be taking shells and stone
and creating elevated reefs throughout Harris Creek.
We are working to restore a critical mass of oyster reefs within one single tributary
river in the Chesapeake Bay. When you have these nice big reefs, the oysters spawn and
they're offspring attached to other reefs in the nearby areas. So that can be really
important in restoring the population overall.
One of the activities that NOAA undertakes is to map the bottom of the Chesapeake Bay
in areas that we think are likely to support good populations of oysters.
This is the first comprehensive project that's attempting to restore an entire tributary.
Not a postage stamp of bottom here and a piece here. We had the broad baseline data from
the Maryland Geological Survey and took that information, identified potential restoration
sites and then we were out verifying those sites, validating the bottom, identifying
the best location for a pre-limited amount of material.
The four of engineers role right now is the substrate planting. The best substrate would
be fossilized shell where we don't have access to that. So we're using the best alternative
substrate that we can find. The granite itself has been shown to be a great foundation for
SPAT to settle on.
We're taking three six inch stone and raising existing oyster beds about a foot. In about
two weeks time they'll come back with oyster shells and SPAT in order to try to restore
that oyster bed.
Here at the Horn Point Oyster Hatchery we raise larvae and SPAT for restoration purposes
and research as well. We begin spawning our oysters in April. Once we have a group of fertilized
eggs we bring them into the mass larval tanks where they will live for about two weeks.
When the group of larvae are ready to set or metamorphose into their adult form we look
for the presence of SPAT or newly attached, newly settled young oysters. They're about
the size of a grain of sand.
When we place the larvae in the setting tanks after a few days we'll look to make sure that
they are adequately set on the clean and aged oyster shells. Oyster recovery partnership
can then take them out to their restoration reefs throughout the Chesapeake Bay and its
tributaries.
We start in the end of April and we go into the end of September. When we get to an area
that they want planted we have GPS coordinates for the corners. I'll take and open the doors
on the sides of the boat and then I'll wash them off with a hose and spreading them over
top. Usually about three or four acre area and that's where they'll grow from there
on.
These are some of the oysters that are about four years old that we planted in the upper
chop tank. When they're smaller they'll be stuck together in clumps like this and then
as they grow they'll break apart in a nice pretty big single oyster.
