Restoration partners in Maryland have put more than 600 million oyster spat into the Chesapeake Bay in the largest targeted restoration effort the watershed has ever seen.600 million oyster spat seems like quite a lot, but oyster spat are pretty small (mostly dime sized or smaller), and the fraction of them that survive until reproductive age (approximately 2 years) is rather small. The fact that this is a relatively minor addition to the Bay is underscored in the article above where most of of the oysters are being planted in one tributary in one river in the Bay, which has many such rivers (depending on how you count), and almost innumerable small creeks like Harris Creek, and requires 3 years of production to achieve.
...According to a report from the Oyster Recovery Partnership, a portion of the 634 million oyster larvae that partners planted in 2012 went into the Upper Bay, where last year an influx of fresh water from spring rains and late-summer storms led to widespread oyster death.
But most of the “spat on shell”—or young oysters “set” onto large oyster shells—went into Harris Creek, a tributary of the Choptank River that was declared an oyster sanctuary in 2010. There, partners hope to restore 360 acres of oyster reef, constructing new reefs and seeding this habitat with spat; close to one-third of this goal has been planted so far.
I sincerely hope they keep Harris Creek an oyster sanctuary; in the past, Maryland has been in the habit of opening oyster "sanctuaries" to commercial fishing as soon as the oysters became commercial size, on the theory that they were just going to die of disease anyway.
My oyster recovery plan would be to halt commercial fishing on oysters for at least 10 years, turn our backs on them, and see if natural reproduction has led to a significant rebound. If so, oysters are worth saving. If not, go ahead and plant non-native oysters.
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