The watermen argued that the rocks interfere with crabbing and fishing. The protests landed on sympathetic ears at the Maryland Department of Natural Resources, which blocked the further use of such materials in the Tred Avon. Maryland watermen and their supporters have protested the use of crushed granite, fossil shell from Florida and clam shells from New Jersey in oyster restoration projects in the Little Choptank and two tributaries of the Choptank - Harris Creek and the Tred Avon River - even though the work has been done in sanctuaries off-limits to commercial harvest. Some watermen, particularly those in Maryland, remain leery of using anything other than oyster shells to provide habitat for bivalves. Bivalves can be found clinging to wooden docks, concrete bridge piers and riprap, the big granite rocks lining the shore to prevent erosion. In the right conditions, oysters will settle and grow on practically any hard surface, not just other oyster shells. We got a terrific spat set on it, and it grew well.” “This past season, the oysters we harvested were from 2-year-old granite we planted,” said Tommy Kellum, the company president. Kellum Seafood, one of the state’s oldest and largest oyster businesses, has in the last few years tested the suitability of crushed concrete from a demolished bridge and ground-down stones taken from a dam on the James River. Working with the Virginia Marine Resources Commission, W. But the shell squeeze is prompting some oyster growers and fishery managers to try alternative “substrate,” the hard material on which baby bivalves live and grow. But the Chesapeake is running short on shells there aren’t enough to go around to sustain the traditional wild fishery - to say nothing of the growing aquaculture industry and an ambitious effort to restore the Bay’s depleted oyster population. Typically, shells of other oysters are the natural landing pads for recently hatched bivalve larvae, which need to attach to something hard as they begin sedentary lives of filtering algae from the water. There’s nothing unusual about that, of course, but these shellfish had settled as baby “spat” and grown to harvestable size on a thick bed of gravel-sized stones that had been put on the river bottom to provide an unconventional home for them. Some Virginia watermen harvested bivalves from public oyster grounds in the Rappahannock River. An unremarkable thing happened in a remarkable way during the recently ended oyster season in the Chesapeake Bay.
0 kommentar(er)
