The Oyster Recovery Partnership (ORP), with its coalition of partners, recently announced the start of their 2012 Chesapeake Bay oyster planting season and the first plantings aimed at fulfilling the goals of President Obama’s Executive Order to restore oyster habitat and populations in 20 Bay tributaries by 2025.
Over the last decade, Maryland’s oyster partners have produced and planted over 3 billion oyster spat spanning 1,500 acres of bottom. With a recent expansion of its setting facility, the University of Maryland’s Horn Point Hatchery and the Oyster Recovery Partnership have the capability to produce and plant between one and two billion oyster spat on shell per year.
As part of a Maryland Governor Martin O’Malley’s Oyster Restoration and Aquaculture Development Plan, the Army Corps of Engineers Native Oyster Restoration Master Plan, and President Obama’s Executive Order 13508, Harris Creek, a tributary of the Choptank River, is the first river targeted for large-scale, tributary-based oyster restoration.
Harris creek was chosen collaboratively by the Maryland Department of Natural Resources (DNR), Army Corps Baltimore District, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) because of its high likelihood to succeed. The same team is developing a scientific “blueprint” to guide restoration in the creek.
The goal is to restore 300-600 acres, of which nearly 100 acres will be planted during the 2012 planting season. The Army Corps is also scheduled to plant 20 acres of new shell and stone substrate to enhance the river bottom to support the new oyster reefs. Restoration is expected to take between 2-5 years at current funding levels. Funds for these restoration activities are provided primarily by DNR, the Army Corps and NOAA.
Additionally, the first agreed-upon definition of a “restored oyster reef” has been adopted by the Sustainable Fisheries Goal Implementation Team based on recommendations from the Oyster Metrics Team, a Bay-wide group of scientists and fishery managers. Specifically, six years post-restoration activity, reefs should have a minimum of 15 oysters and 15 grams of biomass per square meter covering at least 30% of the reef, with at least two year classes of oysters on each reef.
Recent investigations by private and university scientists show that bars planted with spat on shell oysters have greater densities of live oysters compared to natural reefs. These high densities persist for many years after planting.
In addition to its large-scale oyster recovery activities, the Oyster Recovery Partnership operates the Shell Recycling Alliance which has helped recycle nearly 15,000 bushels of shell, supports the Marylanders Grow Oysters program and provides aquaculture and wild fishery support services.
During the 2011 Season, the Oyster Recovery Partnership and UMD HPL produced and planted 510 million disease-free, native oyster spat on shell on over 315 acres in 6 tributaries and processed more than 70,000 bushels of oyster shell. This was the fourth year that over 500 million oysters were produced by the UMD Horn Point Lab hatchery facility in Cambridge, MD.
source: MD DNR
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