Hi everyone, I'm Karris King with the Oyster Recovery Partnership, the leading nonprofit working to restore oysters to the Chesapeake Bay. A huge thank you to our friends at the Baltimore Museum of Industry for giving us a platform to talk about our favorite thing. Oysters. Oysters are important because, in addition to being delicious, they're incredible filter feeders. Just one oyster can clean up to 50 gallons of water per day so you can imagine the benefit of millions of oysters over thousands of underwater acres. Plus, the reefs provide critical habitat for crabs, fish, mussels, and other marine life. Over time, populations have dropped to historically low levels due to poor water quality, oyster disease, and overharvesting. Here at ORP, our goal is to bring oysters back to levels they were hundreds of years ago. Captain John Smith described oysters the size of dinner plates. When ships had to navigate around oyster reefs because they were so tall and abundant, they were considered a navigational hazard. In 2009, we began the large-scale work that we know today, and we've accomplished a lot since this time. ORP has planted 9 billion oysters in the bay on over 2,600 underwater acres, and we've recycled hundreds of thousands of bushels of shell thanks to our restaurant partners and individuals like you. Our recycling and restoration actually go hand in hand because shell is critical to rebuilding oyster reefs. Without it, we just can't operate, which is why we work day in and day out to save shell from area restaurants and public drop sites. So be sure to recycle your shell this evening. From shell recycling, transport, washing, and seeding, the oyster restoration process features many steps and many partners, including the Maryland Department of Natural Resources, Horn Point Oyster hatchery, NOAA, the Army Corps of Engineers, and partners like you. In this video, you'll see the journey a shell takes once it's eaten from plate to reef. Thank you all so much for joining us tonight. I hope you learned something and found the video helpful in understanding the shell recycling process. Please continue to enjoy oysters. We are sustainably grown and harvested and each shell is used to create an oyster reef. For more information on our work and how you can get involved, visit oysterrecovery.org.