Volunteer oyster gardeners help restore the Chesapeake Bay ecosystem

Want to improve the Chesapeake Bay ecosystem? Eat an oyster — then recycle its shell.

It might end up in a foster oyster colony at The Docks at Downtown Hampton, a public pier where volunteers and Chesapeake Bay Foundation staff counted about 2,000 oysters last Thursday, just one of many public and private oyster gardens in the area.

“When you restore oysters, you turn what could be a barren area of river into a hotspot,” said Kenny Fletcher, the Virginia communications coordinator for the CBF.

The foundation seeds recycled shells with spat — the technical term for baby oysters — and hands them over to volunteer oyster gardeners who care for them over the next year at public and private docks. The starter shells provide a spot for wild spat to latch on and start growing.

Caitlin Williams, with Sam Rust Seafood, Inc., holds a cluster of oysters that came out of the Hampton River in Hampton, Va. on Thursday, May 25, 2023. Sam Rust Seafood hosts a shell bin where anyone can drop used oyster shells to be recycled back into the waterways. One oyster shell can host numerous smaller, new oysters. (Kendall Warner/The Virginian-Pilot)

Each year, hundreds of volunteers foster hundreds of thousands of oysters before returning them to the foundation, adding them to sanctuary reefs around the bay. The effort contributes to the Chesapeake Oyster Alliance’s goal of adding 10 billion oysters by 2025.

With just two years to go, the alliance may not meet its goal, according to last year’s “State of the Blueprint” report, which examines the progress of the Clean Water Blueprint put in place in 2010. One of its major goals is to see the bay removed from the federal “dirty waters” list.

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But efforts like those of the volunteers at The Docks aim to speed up the process. Right now, Hampton ecotourism company Shored Up! and the Sam Rust Seafood company, which provides an oyster shell recycling service for local restaurants, are the only ones gardening at the pier — which means there’s plenty of space, said Claire Neubert, co-founder of Shored Up!

Oysters are a key building block for marine life in the bay, Neubert said. They serve as nature’s water filter, with a single oyster cleaning up to 50 gallons of water a day — about the amount used in a 10-minute shower. By fostering oysters and sharing the practice in their ecotours, Shored Up! is trying to get more people involved.

Sam Rust provides a free bin available 24-7, said Caitlin Williams, who works in sales and marketing for the company and fosters oysters herself. She said that their restaurant program and public bin have recycled 500 to 600 bushels of shells.

Besides cleaning the water, oyster clusters provide habitats for small organisms like mussels or tiny shrimp that attract larger fish, said Jessica Lutzow, the Virginia Oyster Outreach Coordinator for the foundation. As a result, though sanctuary reefs can’t be harvested, they make good fishing spots. Oysters in contaminated waters aren’t safe to eat because of contaminant buildup, but the fish they attract are. And they’re “broadcast spawners,” Lutzow said, which means larvae explode away from their original reef and may drift to grow in waters where it’s safe to harvest.

Fletcher said anyone can be an oyster gardener; all it takes is about 45 minutes of training and an easy-to-obtain habitat permit. The foundation provides the training, the spat and public water space, or people who have appropriate water habitats on their property can garden privately.

Visit cbf.org for more information.

Katrina Dix, 757-222-5155, katrina.dix@virginiamedia.com