Hard-Shell Tactics
In Clean-Water Quest, Neighbors Become Oyster Ranchers

By Christy Goodman
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, July 7, 2008

Carolyn Steiner stretched over the edge of a neighbor's pier on Hellen Creek as she tried to wrangle a float that held 600 juvenile oysters.

On the water, James McVey guided his canoe through several pilings to push a train of floats attached to his boat closer to Steiner.

These neighbors along Hellen Creek off the Patuxent River in Calvert County are becoming oyster ranchers as part of a grass-roots effort to improve the water quality in their creek and, in turn, the Chesapeake Bay. While state and federal oyster restoration efforts have cost nearly $60 million since 1994, one recent EPA estimate found that the number of oysters has declined over that time.

So several groups, including the Hellen Creek community, are launching local oyster ranching projects, using state tax credits to help finance their efforts.

"This is providing the opportunity for us to help the environment," said Steiner, 57, who had three of the 3-by-6-foot floats, which are made of PVC piping and contain 600 oysters each, delivered to her pier.

Steiner and her neighbor Bob Wood are among 25 Lusby homeowners along the creek and Blount's Cove who launched 45 floats, containing a total of 27,000 juvenile oysters, last week. They are part of a three-year project led by the Coastal Conservation Association Maryland's Patuxent River Chapter.

Some of the homeowners will donate their oysters to a reef sanctuary. Others will eat them. Steiner said she plans to donate most of her oysters to the sanctuary after the three-year growth period, but added, "We might have to harvest some for the oyster stew for New Year's, though."

Experts say the oyster population in the bay is at 1 percent of historic high levels recorded in the 1880s.

Oyster numbers have persisted at that low point in recent years, "if not worse," Chris Moe, captain of the Hellen Creek project, said as he prepared more floats to be delivered to piers along the waterway.

The nickel-size oysters are expected to grow to a mature size of about three inches in one year, said Moe, a member of the Coastal Conservation Association. A three-inch oyster is capable of filtering up to 55 gallons of water a day. The Hellen Creek oysters will filter nearly a million gallons of water by this time next year, said Moe, who wants to add 100 more oyster floats to the creek next year.

"We want to take this template and drop it in other creeks around the bay," said Moe, who conducted community meetings and training sessions before the launch. "We help people understand the state is paying for it."

State Del. Anthony J. O'Donnell (R-Calvert) was the lead sponsor of the 2002 legislation offering homeowners a $500 tax credit to offset the cost of purchasing aquaculture oyster floats.

"It is exactly the type of activity we wanted to encourage, where everyday citizens get involved in putting oysters back into the bay at some level," O'Donnell said. "My vision is that every waterfront property owner who has a pier would have an oyster float hanging underneath it."

The floats are designed to suspend the oysters in water near the surface, where diseases that threaten them are less prevalent, said Rich Pelz, president of Circle C Oyster Ranching Association in St. Mary's County.

Pelz provided the oyster-filled floats to participants at a discounted rate of three for $500. Each float, which has three mesh bags containing the oysters and some straw, must be flipped once a month to dry out organisms that grow on the outside of the bags. That growth can prevent water from flowing through the bags and slow the oysters' maturation.

In addition to being natural water filters, the oysters help usher in "a whole cascade of life," said McVey. The Hellen Creek resident is the former head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's oyster disease research program.

For five years, McVey has been growing about 4,000 oysters in floats under his pier. He said his floats have designs that are different from the ones he helped launch last week -- more like slings that hold the bags of oysters.

The effects on water quality are already visible, McVey said.

"I have the first submerged aquatic vegetation," he said of underwater grasses, which provide food and habitat to other organisms. "I don't see it anywhere else on my part of the creek."

There also are more grass shrimp, top water minnows and juvenile eels around his piers, he said.

McVey plans to plant his older oysters, which will be ready to reproduce next spring, on an old six-acre oyster bed under the creek as a test to see if the spat -- oyster babies -- will attach to the hard shell surface and grow, creating a natural reef.

If that happens, it will mean the neighborhood oysters can be added to the natural sanctuary.

"We know if we grow these oysters in surface floats they can reach adulthood. If they land on lower areas where the water quality is not so good, they might not do as well," said McVey, who took his oysters to local labs to test for safe eating and as a measurement of the creek's water. "They were quite safe," he said. "They are the canary in the mine."

The conservation group's Patuxent River Chapter has formed a committee to search out other old oyster leases and potential sites for sanctuaries to expand the project, Moe said.

The group already has more than 30,000 oysters floating in St. Thomas Creek in St. Mary's County.

"They want the bay fixed, and this is the way to do it," Pelz said.