DON MERITT, DIRECTOR – OYSTER RESTORATION AT HORN POINT LABORATORY, UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND: 
The bay has gotten a lot dirtier.  There’s a lot more algae blooms and a lot more sedimentation.  I’ve seen the bay when I was a teenager.  In the summer the bay it would be very common to have visibility be 12-15 feet, even 25-30 feet in some places.  Now you are lucky if you can see down a foot.

As we learn more about what causes our bay to degrade ,we’re going to learn more about what will fix it.  And I think that’s what our oyster program here is helping to do.

 
[MARK LOUZON SOT] So all these shells are full of barnacle but it is also good for the spat as well.  So, Chris do you want to be the Counter-in-Chief? (Laughs)
 

DON MERITT, DIRECTOR – OYSTER RESTORATION AT HORN POINT LABORATORY, UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND:
Maryland Department of Natural Resources has a really effective oyster gardening program called “Marylanders Grows Oysters.”  And what they do is they recruit waterfront property owners that have piers or something and they provide them with baby oysters, or oyster spat, and they hold them in trays under their pier for a year and the oysters grow.  And the citizens go out and take care of those.  And once a year Maryland DNR picks those oysters up, takes them to a sanctuary area, puts them on the bottom where they will create this wonderful diverse oyster ecosystem.
 

SUZANNE BRICKER, MANAGER - MANAGER -  NATIONAL ESTUARINE EUTROPHICATION ASSESSMENT, NATIONAL OCEANIC AND ATMOSPHERIC ADMINISTRATION:
The main issue in the Potomac River estuary in my opinion is nutrients.  That means high algae blooms floating on the water.  That sinks and causes low-dissolved oxygen which we also call hypoxia or anoxia.  

So we’re hoping that with our research on the potential for aquaculture of oysters to reduce the systems of water quality health by taken them out water body through filtration.
 

DON MERITT, DIRECTOR – OYSTER RESTORATION AT HORN POINT LABORATORY, UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND:
Our oyster hatchery here, like most other hatcheries, we can control the temperature here and we can get oysters to be ready to spawn pretty much whenever want them to.  Once they spawn, we collect the eggs, we fertilize the egg, we grow the larvae in large tanks.  And it takes 2-4 weeks from the time the eggs are spawned and turn from a swimming larvae into a spat.  

Those spat have to go into some kind of structure that is held under the pier.  Maryland has a cooperative program with the inmates in Hagerstown at one of the prisons and they actually provide the manpower to build the cages.

 
JEFFREY STUART, INMATE, MARYLAND CORRECTIONAL INSTITUTION:
I’ve been building oyster cages to replenish the bay.  So we come in here and put them together.  We do approximately 2 piles a day, about a 130 cages. 

 
CHESTER CONLEY, INMATE, MARYLAND CORRECTIONAL INSTITUTION:
We have several guys working on them.  They have different stages.  When they get bored of doing one area, we switch them to another area.  That way nobody gets monotonous about their own job, you know.  So it goes pretty smoothly, really.

 
GREG HAUPT, REGIONAL MANAGER – WEST DIVISION, MARYLAND CORRECTIONAL ENTERPRISES:
What is does is it provides a lot of our inmates for valuable work and a chance to contribute to society.  So we think we’re doing that.  We make these for the [Maryland] Department of Natural Resources.  They  pay us—our inmates—for working on all of these.  And that money goes back to pay the inmates , pay our salaries, pay our trucks that deliver them.  We’re totally self-supporting.

 
MARK LOUZON, OYSTER GARDENER:
Originally it was going to be four cages.  I said we can take more than that.  Eight, then it grew to ten.  So we’ve run ten cages for the past two years.  It’s purely volunteer so the biggest thing for us is we have to make sure we’re down here every two weeks and do the oyster shaking.  

We love the area and we know the Chesapeake Bay is challenged with keeping water quality up.  We know the oysters are challenged because they dropped off so much over the years.  And we thought this was our way of maybe giving back a little bit.

 
DON MERITT, DIRECTOR – OYSTER RESTORATION AT HORN POINT LABORATORY, UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND:
It’s not just the oysters that are filtering.  It’s the community that the  oyster themselves generate.  Lot of things come and live around oysters.  Many of them are also filter feeders.  So when we talk about the filtering capacity of oysters, what we really should be talking about is the filter capacity of the community that develops because we put oysters out there.