Oyster planting to resume at critical reef near site of Key Bridge collapse
By Tommie Clark
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BALTIMORE (WBAL) — Baby oysters will return to Fort Carroll Reef after last year’s collapse of the Francis Scott Key Bridge blocked organizers from planting a new batch.
Hundreds of thousands of baby oysters will once again be planted this spring at the Fort Carroll Reef, where oysters have been growing for more than two decades.
Lighthouse Point Marina serves as one of the Chesapeake Bay Foundation’s oyster gardening locations on the harbor, and it’ll have 120 cages in which oysters grow off the docks.
Hundreds of cages filled with recycled oyster shells fill the harbor. Each shell grows multiple baby oysters; some are currently under ice.
Kellie Fiala, the Chesapeake Bay Foundation Maryland’s oyster restoration coordinator, told 11 News that the cages act as a nursery for the first nine months of an oyster’s life.
“It allows them to grow out, provide all of those amazing benefits — filtration, habitat, food sources for all sorts of organisms in the bodies of water that they’re growing in. And then, we take them and we like to plant them close to where they’re grown,” Fiala told 11 News.
Some 6 million oysters live under the abandoned Fort Carroll in Baltimore, which acts as a reef where babies are eventually planted. When the Key Bridge came down, Fiala’s team couldn’t check on the oysters for months due to the fort’s proximity to the site, and they had to relocate 800,000 babies to other tributaries.
“Our concern was that when the bridge collapsed, what kind of environmental damage was caused to the oysters? So, we took some time, and then, once we were able to get out there, we were able to go down and do some monitoring,” Fiala told 11 News.
The reef survived the collapse, and now, the foundation is working to ensure the habitat is considered when it comes time for construction of the new bridge.
“Looking ahead, we also need to consider the fact that the demolition of what is still standing, and then, also (how) the rebuild might have impacts on the legacy sediments that are in there,” Fiala told 11 News.
Volunteers will continue to help care for the oysters year-round until they’re ready for a permanent home.
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