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Community‘Ranchers’ make room for oysters
Wednesday, July 9, 2008
 Click here to enlarge this photo Staff photo by DARWIN WEIGEL
Jim McVey of Lusby tows a line of oyster floats Thursday destined for docks on Hellen Creek. The Hellen Creek Oyster Growers organization and the Coastal Conservation Association of Maryland Patuxent River Chapter placed floats with more than 25,000 oysters at docks around the creek. The oysters came from the Circle ‘C’ Oyster Ranch at St. Jerome’s Creek in St. Mary’s County.
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Volunteers in motorboats, trailing strings of floats made of wire mesh and PVC piping, visited piers along the creek to drop off their cargo — each a floating habitat for spat, or baby oysters.
On Thursday, July 3, the Patuxent River Chapter of the Coastal Conservation Association launched the project with the cooperation of local residents to help restore the creek’s languishing oyster population while improving water quality in the Patuxent River tributary.
The participants, or ‘‘oyster ranchers,” all of whom live on the water, will provide shelter to vulnerable baby oysters by tethering floats of oysters to their docks for one year. The 45 floats, made from wire mesh and PVC piping by a St. Mary’s County company, each support about 600 oysters.
The project’s oysters will likely be healthier and more efficient at filtering water than those in beds on the creek floor, said Jim McVey, a project participant who helped with oyster restoration projects when he worked for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA.
When he first started working with oysters, some told him not to bother because the spat surely wouldn’t survive the harsh conditions of the bay and its tributaries, McVey said, as he triumphantly showed off live oysters, some well above market size, that had come from his projects.
Sediment from runoff has been instrumental in the decline of the Chesapeake Bay oyster, while the diseases Dermo and MSX have also done their part to reduce populations, but floats provide an especially hospitable habitat for oysters because they are less likely to be infected by disease or choked by sediment, and the plankton food at the surface is superior to that in deeper waters, McVey said.
‘‘There’s probably other things. I don’t know, I haven’t asked any oysters,” McVey said.
Because of the better surface conditions, the oysters reach the market size of 3 inches in about one year instead of three, he added, improving both their reproductive potential and their ability to filter the water.
From there, the oysters’ fate is in the hands of their respective volunteers, who have the choice of donating them back to the CCA — or enjoying a tasty oyster meal.
Chris Moe, the CCA’s designated ‘‘creek captain” for Hellen Creek, hopes participants will choose to donate them for placement at sanctuaries near Benedict and Sotterley. ‘‘The whole idea is oysters for oysters’ sake, to get that water quality up,” Moe said. ‘‘We want to get these in as many creeks as we can.”
The project, although comparatively modest, has the potential to bring about significant improvement in the creek. A mature oyster can filter about 55 gallons of water a day, meaning that within a year these oysters will be filtering a total of 1.5 million gallons daily, according to Moe.
The creek will not recover without a stable oyster population, Moe said: eliminating the bivalves ‘‘is like cutting out your kidney.”
Project participants receive a tax break that more or less cancels out the cost of the floats, according to the association, while bringing together watershed residents interested in fishing and giving them something concrete to do to help, according to Scott McGuire, president of the Patuxent CCA chapter, the newest in Maryland, starting last year.
‘‘I really think this is cool because it’s an opportunity for people to do something. We don’t think this is going to solve all the programs in the bay, the river or even Hellen Creek, but it’s a good start,” McGuire said. ‘‘This also gives people another reason to care about the water.”
