At least once a week, Buzz Henifin walks outside his Fenwick Island canal-front home and checks on the status of his oysters. In four floats behind his house in a canal off of the Little Assawoman Bay, the hundreds of oysters feed on algae, provide a home to small fish and only need one cleaning a week to stay healthy.
Coastal Point • Jonathan Starkey:
Buzz Henfin, a volunteer oyster gardener, cleans off oysters in one of his four floats while E.J. Chalabala, the wildlife manager for the Center for the Inland Bays, watches. Chalabala runs the oyster gardening project.
On Monday, Henifin pulled the floats out one-by-one, doused the oysters with a hose and said “the cleaner you keep them, the faster they will grow.”
Henifin, a full-time Fenwick Island resident since 1998, is one of nearly 80 volunteers in the Center for the Inland Bays’ Shellfish Gardening Program. In 46 spots across the Inland Bays, volunteers such as Henifin take care of floats full of oysters in the waters behind their homes or businesses.
“It’s gotten to the point where there’s a lot of enthusiasm about it. I think a lot of people cherish their little baby oysters,” said Jim Alderman, the CIB’s restoration coordinator, who helped start the program. “They take a lot of pride in it.”
CIB officials normally provide the volunteers with pinky-nail-size oyster spats in the beginning of the summer to grow in their floats. Officials working on the project said they bring in about 50,000 to 100,000 oyster spats each year.
In October, officials set the oysters — which usually have doubled in size, on average — on a man-made oyster reef at James Farm Ecological Preserve or on mini-floats or rocks in the Little Assawoman Bay, to help restore the native filter-feeding shellfish to Delaware’s Inland Bays. Decades of the disease decimated Delaware’s oyster population.
In 1957, a disease called MSX wreaked havoc on the population and Dermo, a still-prevalent disease in shellfish, did the same in the early 1990’s. Restoring a healthy population to the Inland Bays could improve the water quality and diversity of the bays’ ecological habitat, which is why Henifin signed on for the project when it started in 2003.
“People talk about these bays being pristine 100 years ago, 200 years ago. We, as people, polluted the hell out of them,” said Henifin, who has served as a member on the Center’s Tributary Action Team and Citizens Advisory Committee. “I want to get the bays cleaned up.”
In 2004, a year after the program’s inception, volunteers with that same attitude grew oysters in 14 spots across the bays, and the next year, that doubled. This year, the oysters are thriving in all 46 spots across Delaware’s Inland Watershed and the oyster gardening program “is showing that oysters will grow anywhere in the Inland Bays,” said E.J. Chalabala, CIB’s wildlife manager who is running the program with an official from the University of Delaware’s Sea Grant Program.
Oysters and the Bays
Scientists estimate that one full-grown oyster can filter 50 gallons of water in a day. The filter-feeding shellfish feed on microscopic plants and suspended particles in the water, cycling nutrients and improving the water clarity.
Submerged vegetation benefits from a healthy oyster population because more sunlight can reach the waterway’s floor and stimulate its growth, according to officials and information available at http://darc.cms.udel.edu/ibog/.
But perhaps most importantly for Delaware’s polluted Inland Bays, a healthy oyster population could remove significant amounts of nitrogen and other nutrients from the waters.
Nitrogen, which is used as a growing nutrient on agricultural and residential properties, enters Delaware’s bays daily partially in ground runoff from those lands, and septic systems, and causes excess growth in the bays.
Coastal Point • Jonathan Starkey:
Oysters, like the one pictured above, eat algae and remove excess nutrients from the water, helping the underwater eco-system.
“When excessive amounts of nitrogen gets in the system because of decades of land use, the plants just respond accordingly,” said John Ewart, an aquaculture and fisheries specialist with the University of Delaware’s Sea Grant Program who runs they oyster program with the CIB. “They keep on having more and more productivity.”
Large algae blooms form because of unwanted nutrients, leading to reduced oxygen levels after they die and fall to the ground floor of the bays, where they are eaten by bacteria, Ewart said. That process uses oxygen. The low oxygen levels lead to fish kills and a less diverse ecological habitat.
Oyster populations feed on that algae and remove the nutrients — although some eventually re-enters the water in their waste – and help maintain healthy oxygen levels.
In a report that Carl Cerco, a U.S. Army Corps of Engineer scientist, presented to the state of Maryland in August, he found that increasing Maryland’s oyster population 25-fold would remove 11 million pounds of nitrogen from the Chesapeake Bay.
But removing nutrients, as most experts point out, is only one benefit to maintaining a healthy oyster population.
Oyster reefs — they grow on hard surfaces, including each other — provide a habitat for smaller species, such as worms and grass shrimp, which in turn support populations of crabs, fish and other, larger predators, according to the aforementioned Web site.
“I think it’s pretty clear that (oysters) play an important role in the ecology of the estuary and they also have a commercial value,” Ewart said, calling the shellfish a “keystone species. The combination of that in addition to habitat and water filtration (benefits) suggests to me that they should have a higher profile in discussions and solutions.”
Project funding lacking
Unfortunately for oyster-restoration advocates in the state, Delaware Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Control (DNREC) officials don’t yet see oysters as a viable, cost-effective option to removing pollution in the inland bays.
The Department’s recently-announced proposal of the Pollution Control Strategy would attempt to reduce the amount of nitrogen and phosphorous entering the inland bays by regulating septic systems, buffer requirements and agricultural lands.
While the state is working on an oyster restoration project in the Delaware Bay, there are no such plans in the Indian River, Rehoboth or Little Assawoman bays.
“The Center for the Inland Bays has not yet demonstrated that … oysters would succeed in the Inland Bays,” DNREC Secretary John Hughes said this week. “It’s a valiant effort but so far the answers are not in.
“We would wait until the trial was over before we would invest heavily because it’s taxpayers’ money,” he added, saying that the possibility that disease would again destroy the population is still there. Project officials confirmed that Dermo is still prevalent amongst oysters in Delaware’s bays.
Sussex County approved $10,000 for the project in its last spending plan and Fenwick Island has donated $700.
Grants through the Center’s grant program pay for much of the materials and supplies but there is not enough support for oyster restoration on the Inland Bays for officials to work on the project full-time. Ewart said that the last proposal he wrote to fully-operate the current program was for $15,000.
“We’ve got enough resources to be able to put the time in and be able to expand a little bit,” said Ewart, who with CIB officials is attempting to display oysters’ ecological, and economic value in the Delaware’s Inland Bays. “The problem is we get to the point where there’s more stuff needed to be done than we’ve got resources.”
Nearby oyster restoration efforts
The State of Maryland spends about $5 million annually and receives millions in federal dollars for its three-pronged shellfish restoration effort, according to Tom O’Connell, a Maryland Department of Natural Resources biologist working on the program.
Along with the Chesapeake Bay Foundation - which runs an extensive oyster gardening program in Virginia and Maryland - other nearby organizations and colleges, the state has been working to restore oysters to Maryland waterways for decades.
State officials plant oysters in areas open for harvest, as well as in sanctuaries, where harvest is not permitted, and mixed-use areas to promote restoration for ecological and economic purposes.
“We’re not trying to say its more valuable economically or ecologically,” said Donald Meritt, a scientist with the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science, adding that he has been working with oysters for three decades. UMCES works in collaboration with the state toward oyster restoration.
“If you start looking at (oysters from) only from one point of view, the value judgments are going to be skewed toward that view,” Meritt added.
O’Connell said, however, that restoration efforts have been largely unsuccessful because of disease that has also plagued Maryand’s native oyster population since the late-20th century. Maryland officials are currently studying the possible benefits of introducing a non-native oyster to Maryland’s waters, due to that lingering disease.
“We’ve been trying to enhance habitat for more than 40 years (but) we have not seen the increase in abundance we would have liked to have seen,” O’Connell said. “Impacts of disease really took hold in 1980s. The population continues to decrease and remain at a low level primarily because of disease.”
DNREC has been working on the Delaware Bay oyster restoration project in cooperation with several Delaware, New Jersey and federal agencies and organizations, to restore populations there for economic and ecological purposes for at least three years, according to DNREC project manager Rick Cole.
The Delaware Bay Restoration group has received a total of $2.75 million in federal congressional appropriations for the project in the last two years. DNREC also earmarks taxes placed on private harvesters in the area to help fund the project. The Delaware department does not use any private taxpayer monies for the restoration effort, which, according to Cole, has been successful.
In the summer of 2005, officials working on the restoration project planted about 10,500 tons of oyster shells for “seed beds” throughout 150 acres of the Delaware Bay to provide oysters a place to attach, grow and reproduce, according to www.delawareestuary.org.
“We’re currently collecting data for 2006,” Cole said. “The 2005 sites showed that reproduction was enhanced by at least three times what it was in areas that were not re-shelled or replanted.”
Read more about Delaware’s commercial oyster industry in next week’s Coastal Point.