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Shocking Celebrity Suicides
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Effort Boosted To Save Native Oysters
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CBS
It's worked in small pilot projects, but now efforts to save native oysters are scaling up.
Alex DeMetrick reports the strategy is to establish major sanctuaries in rivers feeding the Chesapeake Bay.
Heading upstream from the Severn River Bridge, a Chesapeake Bay Foundation boat carries a cargo of shells. Each holds the small brown spots of baby oysters -- nine million of them. It's just a fraction of the half billion going into Maryland rivers this summer. "We are exceeding our 525 million oysters planted last year," said Stephan Abel with the Oyster Recovery Partnership. "So the question now is, how do we link these different restoration efforts together in a riverwide system."
In the case of the Severn, it means a series of new oyster reefs.
But unlike past restoration efforts where new oysters were scattered on flat bottom, these are going on three dimensional underwater mounds.
It was a job that started last winter when watermen hired by the state dredged up old shells over 20 acres on the Severn to build-up a five acre reef.
The scale now is to stock the entire Severn and put it off-limits to oyster harvesting.
River sanctuaries will be the starting point to spread oysters and the life they support back into the Bay.
Using rivers to jumpstart new populations of native oysters is showing big promise in Virginia's part of the bay. The survival rate there is triple what was initially expected.
(© MMX, CBS Broadcasting Inc. All Rights Reserved.)
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© MMX, CBS Corporation. All Rights Reserved.
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