This fall the oysters will be reseeded in good locations around the bay. These will be new locations, as the old home grounds are now used by the commercial growers raising gigas . Roger is diving to locate good rocky-bottomed sites where a bed of old shell can be laid before reseeding. After several years the oysters will mature and handle their own spawning. Anja points out the importance of having the native oyster back up to original levels, especially if the commercial growers should ever close up shop and pull out the non-native oysters.
Oysters play a very important role in the estuarine ecosystem, filtering the water.
Areas where oysters have much reduced numbers, such as the Chesapeake Bay, have great problems with water quality. Native oysters in Coos Bay are slowly coming back, as they were hard hit when the silt from the fire-denuded hills around the Bay covered over the oyster beds. NRC Associate Works with NMFS Kym Jacobson, a National Research Council Associate, started working with Mary Arkoosh in NMFS Northwest on August 1. Kym comes to us from a post-doc position at the Seattle Biomedical Research Institute, where she was working on a vaccine candidate for malaria. While she is here, Kym is examining the combined effects of anthropogenic stressors and parasitic infection in juvenile salmonids.