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.