When you eat an oyster on the half shell you'd be excused if you didn't think much about the shell
But in places like here in Washington, DC,
some oyster shells go on to play an important conservation role after the oysters get eaten.
Just up the Chesapeake Bay on the Severn River, this boat is carrying 50 million baby oysters.
But it didn't pull them out of the water - in fact, it's dumping them in.
It's part of a far-reaching plan to restore the health of the Chesapeake Bay
by repurposing the shells that might have once been thrown away
to carry the next generations of native oysters.
If you think of the bay as an organism,
oysters are kind of like the kidneys. They filter out impurities like excess nitrogen and phosphorus.
In fact one full-grown oyster can filter
50 gallons of water every day!
But before they can do that,
free swimming baby oyster larvae need a hard surface to grow on so they can become spat -
the stage of life where they begin growing a shell. And the best home for an oyster spat,
is another oyster shell.
The oyster spat live and grow by filtering water. If you drop a spat on the bottom of the bay,
almost anywhere, it's mud. You drop a spat into that, it will suffocate.
It needs a hard place to attach to call it home.
All it takes is for someone to pick up the shells that would be thrown away.
That's what the Oyster Recovery Partnerships', shell recycling alliance does.
So we go through about four thousand to about six thousand oysters in a week.
All of our oyster shells go into the Chesapeake Recovery or Bay Recovery Program. They come in twice a week
take all of our shells, it goes back into the Bay. Pickups happen every one or two weeks from restaurants,
and there are even sites where anyone can drop off their own shells.
Shells are then taken to the University of Maryland's oyster hatchery at Horn Point,
where they're aged in the sun for up to two years
to limit the chance of introducing invasive organisms.
Then oyster spat are attached. A shell can hold up to ten baby oysters -
that's a lot of new wild oysters from one farm raised half shell.
Not so long ago the Chesapeake
overflowed with oysters. They grew in reefs big enough to be obstacles to boats
and became one of the crops that defined the area.
And so many oysters were pulled out of the bay that their shells were almost literally cheap as dirt.
And you saw mountains of shells
and I mean those mountains might have been 100 feet high for all I know.
Entire towns were built on oyster shell and
their economy was
harvesting the oyster. They're shipping by rail and they're emptying the Chesapeake Bay of oyster.
Because of this historic over harvesting, as well as changing water quality and disease,
wild oyster harvests here are down to as low as 1% of historic numbers.
So where do the oysters that people still enjoy around here come from?
Mostly from oyster farms that do good business
providing the now-valuable delicacy. And now the shells from these oysters are valuable too, for restoration.
Oysters are the equivalent in Chesapeake Bay of hard corals down in the tropics.
They create the hard bottom that an oyster ecosystem is dependent upon. So it's not just the
filtration capacity of the oysters; it's all the organisms that wouldn't be there if the oysters weren't there.
The oyster is one thing we can do to
begin to filter the waters. It's going to take probably billions and billions of oysters,
but today's planting is the first step in that direction.
The program is now the largest shell recycling network in the nation
and with hundreds of participating restaurants
wholesalers and drop-off sites, it's becoming possible to eat your way to a healthier Bay!
There are many other shell recycling programs.
Look for one near you at oysterrecovery.org/shell-recycling-alliance