Resurgence after spill

Oysters go into water to clean up after 2000 oil spill

Friday, July 11, 2008

Click here to enlarge this photo Staff photo by DARWIN WEIGEL Chesapeake Bay Foundation volunteer Lloyd Lewis waits to throw out a buoy Tuesday to mark the oyster bar at Kitts Marsh on the Patuxent River before laying down 24 tons of oyster shell loaded with spat. E-Mail This Article | Print This Story Click here to enlarge this photo Staff photos by DARWIN WEIGEL Chesapeake Bay Foundation volunteer Lloyd Lewis shows oyster shells with high-density spat he and crew put down Tuesday on an oyster bar at Kitts Marsh on the Patuxent River. The project was in conjunction with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which manages the Patuxent River Restoration Project that was mandated after the oil spill in 2000. Click here to enlarge this photo Chesapeake Bay Foundation volunteer Lloyd Lewis, lower, and staff member Tom Zolper shovel oyster loaded with spat onto the conveyor belt aboard the Patricia Campbell Tuesday at the oyster bar at Kitts Marsh on the Patuxent River. Click here to enlarge this photo Karl Willey, captain of the Chesapeake Bay Foundation’s Patricia Campbell oyster bar restoration vessel, wets down 24 tons of oyster shell loaded with spat Tuesday before heading out to an oyster bar at Kitts Marsh on the Patuxent River.

On Tuesday, July 8, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, with the help of the Chesapeake Bay Foundation, dumped more than 3 million spats, or baby oysters, onto a reef near the Chalk Point Generating Station in Prince George’s County.

The location was appropriate, as the work was funded by a legal settlement with PEPCO concerning an oil spill near there in 2000, according to Rich Takacs with the NOAA Restoration Center.

The ‘‘seeding” of the reef at Kitts Marsh follows a 2004 seeding of 10 million spats that kick-started the recovery; many of those spats survived and are now oysters of market size, but the second seeding is important to provide greater diversity in age, Takacs said. The newcomers will also bolster a population struggling with sediment and disease.

‘‘We do have a lot of oysters down there and we’re pretty happy with what we have,” he said.

Kitts Marsh is a designated sanctuary, set aside for research since the late 1990s. It is off-limits to harvesting.

The contents of several huge hampers of oyster shells, covered in spat that had made them their new home, were distributed in a designated area of the reef with the help of a shipboard conveyor belt — and some earnest shoveling by scientists and volunteers.

The ship, the Patricia Campbell, belongs to the CBF, which NOAA contracted to do the work.

NOAA and CBF have high hopes for the reef’s reseeding, bolstered by the spats’ auspicious start. Their survival far exceeded what was expected, according to Stephanie Reynolds, a fisheries scientist for CBF.

‘‘These are really nice,” she said, before spraying down her cargo with bay water to ensure they survived the trip to the reef. ‘‘We’ve been having a good year making oysters at our setting facility,” especially after lackluster setting at facilities baywide last year.

By making them cluster together, the spats’ high setting rate will also protect them from predators by making them harder to pry loose, according to Lloyd Lewis, a CBF volunteer from Mayo with a PhD in oceanography and ocean engineering.

‘‘The clusters are great. They’re really a good thing,” he said. ‘‘Individual little guys lying on the bottom — that’s really not a good idea.”