There are many ways to spend a Wednesday morning. But for the volunteers who showed up to the Jackson Estuarine Lab in Durham this week, no option sounded better than helping count baby oysters while overlooking the ocean.
Kelsey Meyer-Rust is the coastal conservation coordinator for The Nature Conservancy in New Hampshire. The work of the volunteers helps with Supporting Oyster Aquaculture and Restoration, a longer oyster reef restoration project, she explained.
Oyster reefs in the region have been declining for decades now, mainly due to overharvesting, sedimentation issues and diseases, Meyer-Rust said. But oysters are an essential part of thriving marine ecosystems, also contributing greatly to sea-based economies.
“Oysters are filter feeders so they actually help a lot with water quality,” Meyer-Rust said. “Oyster reefs [also] provide habitats for other species like juvenile fish, and they also provide shoreline protection.”
Climate change can make oyster reefs even more vulnerable to disappearance, meaning restoration projects are especially important and timely, Meyer-Rust explained. “Things like warmer water temperatures or ocean acidification can create almost unsuitable living environments for oysters,” she added.
Some of the restoration sites that will receive the oysters are in New Hampshire’s Great Bay, including Whitman Point, Nannie Island and Squamscott River. Since the 1970s, the oyster population in the Great Bay has declined by about 90 percent.
“These all used to be thriving oyster reefs. So these restoration programs are to try to help restore these reefs so that we can have healthy oysters again,” Meyer-Rust said.
But the oysters still have a long way to go before reaching the restoration sites.
First, the volunteers must help count baby oysters growing on shells – also known as oyster spat. These babies look like red circles with a protruding black dot in the middle. From these circles, new oysters will form.
“They'll eventually just start growing and pop off when they're ready. And sometimes they'll actually stick together … that's how the oyster reefs grow,” Meyer-Rust explained to the volunteer group sitting around picnic tables.
Jan Keravich had no idea how oysters grew before volunteering. “I never thought about what they would look like. It never dawned on me,” she said. Even so, the red circles were not what she expected.
Keravich is a special education teacher at Oyster River Middle School – very on theme. But she said she has never volunteered for a science-related project before.
It doesn’t take long for her to get comfortable. Soon, she has a whole system going: dipping many muddy shells into a bucket of water and lining them up on the picnic table before starting to count the baby oysters.
The other five volunteers came as a group. They all work for the Global Seafood Alliance. “It's just so fitting because we're all about promoting responsible seafood at our organization,” Devin Meserv explained.
The group said they welcomed a change of scenery from the office space. “It's really fun, but challenging,” Vicky Mutschler said. “I didn't think it was going to be this hard to actually figure out which ones are a little baby spat and what's just dirt and those other little creatures.”
After the volunteers are done counting, the baby oysters will go to oyster farms to grow out during the summer. In the fall, they will be taken to the restoration sites.
“The goal for the volunteers is to go through all the shells and try to count all the spat they can find,” Meyer-Rust said. “And all of this is helpful data to try and see year by year how our settlement is doing with our baby oysters.”
