Well this is a beautiful bid bay morning here on the Corsica River. I'm Frank DeGelio Nardo with the Corsica Conservancy, a volunteer organization that's been devoted to restoring the Corsica River now for since 2005. For a while one of the things that we've been doing for the last six years is working with the Department of Natural Resources to bring oysters into the river to restore some of our historic oyster bars here. And the key person in that program is to my left, Chris Judy, with the Department of Natural Resources. Chris was kind and us to come out this morning and give us a little hand. Like I said, this is an old volunteer effort. We've got about 44 residents in this area that have peers on the river that have agreed to have oysters growing after peers and we're going to show you how to do that. Basically we've got pages that have been provided by DNR using I think prison industry folks to construct them. And we hang them off of the peers. We keep them raised up off of the bottom where they can grow better. They're not as lively as the weeds or die off if they're raised off the bottom and they're still. And I don't know if you can see these oysters. They have a lot of mud on them, but they come to us in the fall from the state's hatchery at Horn Point in Cambridge, Maryland. At that point the spat or just little dots for the most part. They grow here over the river, over the winter and then in the spring we go around and collect them to deposit them out on the farm. Now, let's just talk a little bit about what you're seeing here. You may want to get a little close up. This is a shell with some spat. One, two, that one's dead. They don't all live. Three, four, five, six. So we have six live and about three dead. We have spat on some other shells. Some of the spat are covered by some of this growth. These are briozoans, mud tube worms. So what looks like brown mud or gook slime. Now, here's actually some eggs of a goby fish. They're covered in some of the growth. So we have some creatures growing on the shells. spat, of course, growing on the shells. This is a miniature reef occurring at the pier. These oysters after they've grown, after the person's pier, are taken into the river, planted on a sanctuary, and they continue to grow. Now we can show you the product that you have after three, four, five years. After the spat grow a number of years, these are perhaps five or six years old. They become large clumps of oysters. Again, maybe a shell started with six or five spat, turns into a clump of two or three large oysters. Here's some oysters here and these two. With mussels, mussels grow on the oysters after they've lived on the reef a while. The oysters and the mussels filter. Some other creatures, barnacles, they filter the water. So again, the reef that started at the pier has continued on the oyster bar in the course cut. So this is a natural oyster from the reef. It's a single oyster, a nice shape. Just an individual oyster like to see at a restaurant. So at the reef, there are some of these natural oysters, but there are thousands and thousands of these oysters that were grown at people's pier. So nature is producing oysters for the reef at a low level, however, and the people here in the river are producing oysters for the reef at a higher level. That's pretty much what we have to do. The Marylanders grow oysters program. A lot of cooperative effort and teamwork. Yeah, and this is going on throughout the state. Chris, I should get how many foreign initiations you've got growing. We have 30 different tributaries growing oysters after tears. We did some rough calculation about how many oysters we've been able to get out just in the course of the river here over the last six years. We're probably somewhere around a quarter of a million to a half a million oysters, which makes a considerable impact, you think, because each oyster, mature oyster, can filter up to 50 gallons of water a day. Let's purify and 50 gallons of water a day. And when you think about a river like this, where you've had a lot of success in restoration, but we still struggle with water clarity and trying to keep the algae down. Oysters are just as effective a tool as you could think of in getting that job done. So hope you got something out of this little session this morning. We're going to do our collection, and then head down river to the oyster bar and do our planting. Hopefully if you live on the river, join us in this kind of endeavor. If you don't live on the river, support course of river conservancy. You can find out more information at course of the river conservancy.org on the internet. you