Harris Creek (Maryland)

Transcription

My name is Mike Naylor, I'm with the Maryland Department of Natural Resources and I'm the Shellfish Program Manager. What were 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 their offspring attach to other reefs in the near by area. 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 and 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 pretty limited amount of material. The Corps of Engineers role right now is the substrate planting. The best substrate would be fossilized shell but 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 to six in stone and raising existing oyster beds about a foot in about two weeks time they will come back with oyster shells and spat in order to try to restore the 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 metamorph 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 will look to make sure that they are adequately set on the cleaned 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 side of the boat and then i'll wash them off with a hose, spreading them over the top of usually about a three or four acre area and that's where they will grow from there on. These are some of the oysters that are about four years old that we planted in Upper Choptank When they're smaller they will be stuck together in clumps like this and then as they grow they'll break apart into nice, pretty, big, single oysters.