February 3, 2013 โ Choptank Riverkeeper sees "thousands" of bivalves, both planted and natural.
"You literally couldn't take a step without walking on oysters," Koslow said in a recent release by the Mid-Shore Riverkeeper Conservancy.
"In my four years as the Choptank Riverkeeper, I have never seen spatfall density like there is in Harris Creek."
Harris Creek, on the east side of Tilghman Island near the mouth of the Choptank River, is the focus of a state and federal effort to restore oysters to a corner of the Chesapeake Bay. The estuary once brimmed with the shellfish, but disease, pollution and overharvesting reduced the population to barely one percent of historic levels.
Oysters are a key to the bay's health. Not just tasty to eat, they help filter the bay's waters, and their depletion coincided with the bay's decline.
Harris Creek was targeted for restoration to fulfill one of the goals set by President Obama's 2009 executive order on the bay, which calls for reviving oyster populations in 10 Maryland water ways by 2025. The Army Corps of Engineers and the Maryland Department of Natural Resources began working last year to expand historic oyster bars in the creek and seed them with baby oysters, or spat, produced in a state hatchery.
Read the full story in the Baltimore Sun