http://www.bizjournals.com/baltimore/news/2013/10/14/40000-oysters-grow-in-baltimore-harbor.html?page=all

Nearly 40,000 oysters to grow in Baltimore's Inner Harbor

The Inner Harbor waters will soon be home to 37,500 new residents — baby oysters.

The Waterfront Partnership of Baltimore is teaming up with the Chesapeake Bay Foundation to plant five oyster gardens around the Inner Harbor on Tuesday. It’s another step in the Healthy Harbor initiative, the Waterfront Partnership’s mission to make Baltimore’s harbor swimmable and fishable by 2020.

“If we had a clean Chesapeake Bay we wouldn’t have to do any of this stuff,” saidAdam Lindquist, the Healthy Harbor coordinator for the Waterfront Partnership.

The gardens will be located at five points around the Inner Harbor: near the Rusty Scupper restaurant; near the Lightship “Chesapeake,” between Piers III and IV; between Piers IV and V; and in Fells Point.

The 75 oyster cages in the gardens will each hold 500 baby oysters, which will help clean the water as they mature over the next nine months. After they reach adulthood in June 2014, the oysters will be transported to the Fort Carroll Oyster Sanctuary.

The project costs about $15,000 per year for the materials and use of the Snow Goose, the Chesapeake Bay Foundation’s boat used to transport the oysters. The cost doesn’t include volunteer hours to maintain the gardens, Lindquist said. A grant from the Abell Foundation will help fund the initiative.

About 12 volunteers each from Brown Advisory, Legg Mason, BGE/Constellation Energy and T. Rowe Price, as well as students from Digital Harbor High School and the Green School of Baltimore, will be responsible for maintaining the oyster cages. That requires pulling them to the surface once a month to scrub off any barnacles, mussels or microorganisms.

If the program is successful, Lindquist said he hopes to repeat it next year with new oysters.

Oysters are filter feeders, meaning they clean the water as they feed on the algae that suffocates aquatic life. The Chesapeake Bay once had enough oysters to filter the entire volume of the bay in three days; today’s oyster population is only 1 percent of historical levels.

But oysters alone can’t clean the Inner Harbor. Stormwater runoff polluted with excess nutrients is the root cause of the harbor’s algae blooms, so Lindquist said the Waterfront Partnership will continue to focus on other measures outside the oyster program to get the harbor to a swimmable, fishable state.

“Oysters are not the only solution,” Lindquist said. “It’s just one more thing we can do to help restore the ecosystem, but really the harbor is just a reflection of the health of our neighborhoods.

Diatom and Oysters

http://www.smsi.org/publications/mn4803-5.shtml

DIATOMS AND OYSTERS

by J. Bartholomew

From our good friend, J. Bartholomew, we have interesting news. Together with Dr. Hopkins, he is now engaged in oyster research at Biloxi, Miss. It seems that this bivalve delicacy is on the way out,or at least rapidly decreasing in numbers at this locality which is economically, as well as gastronomically, a great loss to the citizenry at large. It may be possible that polution by waste water from Freeport Sulphur Co. is the cause of the oyster demise; however, it may also be possible that there are other causes, hence, this research project.

One reason for which this project is most interesting to microscopists is the fact that young oysters find their main food supply in plankton of which diatoms are the most prominent inhabitants. One may almost say no diatoms , no oysters. Some curious observations have been made in this respect. Mr. Bartholomew reports that the Menhaden (a surface feeding fish of the herring family) is quite a consumer of diatoms. He writes as follows: "You will probably be astonished to know that a 200 millimeter beaker of Menhaden intestines will frequently yield, after cleaning 25 millimeter of diatoms. Years ago, I thought I was a collector but my hat is off to the Menhaden."

"It is possible to set up an oyster control under laboratory conditions, feed him for 24 hours in natural seawater rich in plankton, take him out at the end of the period, scrub him, sterilize him and put him into filtered sea water and let him deficate for 24 hours and then make complete diatom studies of what has actually passed through his intestines. These angles of course fascinate me. Of the 60 odd genera and perhaps 100 species, common in townet-takes and the studies of the mud bottom, darned if the little brat does not confine himself almost wholly to Melosira, several species Cosciusdiscus, goodness knows how many varied species and Navicula - virtually all the strictly linears he rejects and even among the Navicula will only pick the nearly oval shapes. Also in studying sizes, if the Cosciusdiscus, for instance, will average a hundred to one hundred and fifty microns in natural sea water, the little skunk will ingest nothing beyond 50 or 60 microns. We are now ready to set up pure cultures in Miguel solution and grow the genera and species that the oysters accept. We will then treat the cultures in various percentages of bleedwater to see how it affects the growth of the diatoms themselves!

Mr. Bartholomew is inviting our diatom interested readers to cooperate with him in this project, particularly the taxonomitical assistance would be helpful.If you feel you can be of help, kindly contact J. E. Nielsen, 5517 Drexel Ave., Chicago 37.

J.E.N.

Can We Save the Ponds by Eating Oysters?

Can Mussels and Oysters be used to consume Nitrogen in ponds.
Swedish experience and proposals from USA.
Diatoms and Fish are a better and simpler option.

News report from Martha's Vineyard

http://www.mvgazette.com/article.php?22098

Can We Save the Ponds by Eating Oysters?

By MIKE SECCOMBE

... a solution to the most pressing environmental problem on Martha’s Vineyard: pollution of our ponds by nitrogen which leaches out of septic systems.

And it’s a solution which is cost effective, creates jobs and is delicious.

We’re talking shellfish, folks.

See, about a decade ago, the Gullmar Fiord on the Swedish west coast had the same problem the ponds on this Island have today. That is, excessive nitrogen fueled excessive growth of algae which in turn led to what they call eutrophication of the water, essentially the removal of oxygen, which makes life untenable for other plants and animals.

Then a team lead by a marine ecologist with the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences named Odd Lindahl, began cultivating mussels. They found they could cut the nitrogen load (i.e. the total nitrogen in the water) by 20 per cent, at a lower cost than a standard water treatment plant.

“In one year they removed 39 tons of nitrogen from the fiord,” said Rick Karney, director of the Martha’s Vineyard Shellfish Group.

......

“There are 933 existing residences in the Edgartown Great Pond watershed,” said Mr. Wilcox. “There’s roughly 300 more than the pond can tolerate.

“And we’re looking at a potential 749 extra residences, which could be built under existing zoning,” he said.

Edgartown is currently working to extend sewerage to enough of those currently-existing houses to reduce the nitrogen load by the 30 per cent.

“That can and will address the existing situation,” said Mr. Wilcox, adding:

“But what about future development? Every additional house is in excess of what that threshold number for nitrogen is.”

Of course, the town could just keep extending the sewer system; the town’s wastewater treatment plant has extra capacity. But that is very expensive.

“The areas they are doing now, it comes out to $10,000 to $15,000 for each house, which is actually relatively cheap,” said Mr. Wilcox, pointing out also that those properties now being done were close to the facility.

“But if you have to build a new plant, the cost could be three, four, five times that.

“Who pays that? People have batted around the idea of a nitrogen tax paid by all residents in the watershed. Maybe there could be impact fees for any new development.”

....

“If we don’t do something about growth, the ponds are going to suffer.”