Share to Facebook Share to Twitter Share to Linkedin As summer’s ocean-based tales of renegade sharks and breaching whales dazzle and captivate, oyster restoration projects around the world are not to be outdone. It’s on these same sunny days that champions of these humble but ecologically critical bivalves promote their planting and proliferation goals of hundreds of thousands, or millions, or billions of oysters. One of the biggest stories is found in the largest estuary in the United States, where over ten years, environmentalists have been working to reverse a historic ecological decline and introduce ten billion new oysters by 2025.
Workboats form a procession as they depart their berths in Deep Creek in Newport News, Virginia, for ...
[+] the open waters of the James River. (Photo by Adrin Snider/Newport News Daily Press/Tribune News Service via Getty Images) Tribune News Service via Getty Images Multiple coalitions of champions of the Chesapeake Bay set their sights on the number as far back as 2014. And now the Chesapeake Oyster Alliance , a coalition assembled by the Chesapeake Bay Foundation (CBF) claims a grand total of at least six billion oysters have been added to the Bay and its tributaries since 2017.
Oysters matter because they are a keystone species, critical to the filtering and oxygenation of the water they live in. When found in reefs, they provide shelter for complex chains of life and can create an environment for diverse aquatic life to grow and th.