The pandemic has been brutal to the restaurant industry. Likewise, the small-scale oyster growers of Barnegat and Delaware bays have been extremely hard hit as restaurants cut back on their orders or shut down altogether.
One bit of good news, however, is a new partnership formed by the Pew Charitable Trusts and The Nature Conservancy, intended to support the oyster industry while also helping to restore damaged and dying reefs in coastal waters.
NJ Spotlight News reports that the initiative, called Supporting Oyster Aquaculture and Restoration (SOAR), has designated $2 million to buy back some 5 million oysters from over 100 oyster farmers in New England, the mid-Atlantic, and Washington state. Once the bivalves are purchased, they are transported back to the water to be “replanted” on existing oyster reefs in need of restoration.
The program reached New Jersey earlier this month (a total of seven states are involved) and is dedicated to purchasing over 620,000 oysters from some 20 Barnegat and Delaware bay growers. “We still have some limited follow-up plantings on both coasts, but the bulk of our phase one is now complete,” said Pew’s Zack Greenberg, who heads the project’s New Jersey effort. “It really has been community-wide restoration at its finest.”
In the first week of December, Parsons Seafood hosted two of Pew’s four buyback drop-offs. Parsons figured about nine farmers came by to offload roughly 240,000 market-size oysters — bivalve mollusks that, in normal times, would be in high demand by restaurants and raw bars bustling for the holiday season.
Parsons and his crew loaded the haul — about 50 tons — onto a 48-by-24-foot barge and made their way to a designated reef in nearby Tuckerton Bay, where they used a high-pressure hose to push the oysters overboard. “It took a day and half to load the barge,” Parsons said, “and literally about 20 minutes to hose it over.”
The restoration site — Tuckerton Reef — was established by Parsons in 2017, in collaboration with Stockton University’s Marine Field Station. The effort is called the Parsons Oyster Reef Recovery. At the program’s hatchery at nearby Great Bay Marina, oyster larvae are added to tanks lined with oyster and clam shells that have been recycled from local restaurants, along with conch donated by Cumberland County-based canner La Monica Fine Foods. Within a day or two, the larvae “set” on the shell and begin to grow. At that point, they’re ready to be transported out to Tuckerton Reef.
The magic of oysters is that they create their own, self-sustaining habitat. Using a calcium carbonate, cementlike substance, they clump together once they’ve settled onto the sea floor. They then form reefs that not only filter enormous amounts of seawater — a single oyster can filter 50 gallons a day — but protect themselves against predators like the cownose ray, which much prefers an individual shellfish over an impenetrable mass. A robust oyster reef nurtures a robust ecosystem of fin fish, shellfish and seagrasses, and can also stabilize an eroding shoreline by providing a natural buffer against wave action and sea-level rise.
One fact that was mentioned, but not the reason that is so significant is that oysters filter nitrogen out of water, and so the fact that an oyster can filter as much as 50 gallons of water in a 24 hour period is incredibly important. Nitrogen is one of the contaminants in a water body and can result from poor management practices on coastal farms and water bodies, or faulty septic systems, etc. We need to clean up our water bodies and Working with Mother Nature and responsible natural processes to do so is pure common sense. There is so much to be learned but using oysters (for instance) (and using the oyster shells from restaurants and fish markets, processing them to kill of pathogens and then using them as a substrate for growing oyster cultch is a huge plus. . There is a very successful shellfish hatchery here on the Vineyard where many oysters are raised from tiny seed each year and are provided to local oyster farmers and fishermen. Transferred to grow out tanks and bags we have a very productive fishery and a very nutritious source of potential food. I am a bit dubious about the weight of the oysters that can be carried on a barge of that size. I hope that some one will check the weights and numbers and confirm.
The Hatchery is supported by all six towns on the Vineyard and founding (I believe) by now semi retired scientist Rick Karney and the current director Emma Green Beach, Has been an incredible resource for this island and the aquaculture as well as wild oyoster fisheries.
I should have mentioned that RIck Karney grew up in New Jersey, has consulted all over the world on shell fish propagation and is highly respected! Particularly by those of us who have been privileged to work with him.
Reseeding receding reefs!
Love it!
The only concern I see is that the bivalves arent in a reef yet. It is presumed that the bivalves survived being out of water from the time of harvest to the time they are washed overboard. Then the other head ache is the bivalves are just littering the floor. No attempt was made to allow them to start the bonding thus creating the reef.
The article to me suggests that the bivalves are just going to magnetically attach and become a win-win. An awful lot of presumptions.