Hungry rays thwart river oyster restoration effort June 1, 2006
Posted by Andy Carroll in : Conservation , trackback
Despite their efforts to help revive the Chesapeake Bay’s declining shellfish population, the Chesapeake Bay Foundation and The Nature Conservancy have reported that Cow-nosed rays have eaten about 90% of the 775,000 oysters they placed on an artificial reef in the Piankatank states the DailyPress.com
The loss was discovered by scuba divers and it is a serious blow to the conservation efforts. Historically, the rays had arrived later in the season but this year they arrived to soon for the oysters to hide beneath a bed of 30,000 bushels of empty oyster shells, foundation oyster grower Tommy Leggett said.
“Going on past histories and stuff, (the oysters) should have been in the clear,” said Bob Fisher, who is studying rays at the Virginia Institute of Marine Science. The rays may have entered the bay earlier because of warmer-than-normal water temperatures.The loss of oysters illustrates the difficulty in restoring the shellfish population in the Chesapeake Bay. The conservancy and the foundation are using a strain of oysters that have been specifically bred for their tolerance against disease-causing parasites that have killed off much of the bay’s oysters. The bay’s oyster population is now about 1 percent of what it was a century ago.
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