A cage filled with empty-looking oyster shells sits in front of Kellie Fiala on the Canton Waterfront promenade. A crowd of eager high school students from the Baltimore Lab School gather around her as she lifts up a shell for all to see.
“Raise your hand if you know what a baby oyster is called?” she asks.
“Spat!” yells a student.
“Spat. I love it,” Fiala, who works on oyster restoration with the Chesapeake Bay Foundation, nods enthusiastically as she continues. “So there are thousands of spat — baby oysters — on these oyster shells.”
Oysters play a critical role in cleaning the Chesapeake Bay. Baltimore's Inner Harbor became home in September to Maryland's largest oyster garden, where baby oysters grow up to be water-cleaning machines.
Fiala points to a spat, which to the naked eye looks like freckles on the shell, smaller than the size of pennies.
Oyster procreation, she explains, is a little less romantic than when a mommy oyster and daddy oyster love each other very much.
“It all happens in the water. So the males release their genetic material, the females release theirs, and then after it's fertilized in the water, it's just floating around, swimming around for two weeks. The only time that an oyster can move and swim is in that first two weeks,” she tells the kids.
The students’ job is to provide that spat with a new home — in the form of recycled shells from local restaurants. There, the spats will need to live for several months where there could be anywhere from three to two-dozen spats on each shell.
Joel Schlossberg is the marina manager for Lighthouse Point Marina in Canton, which is also now the home to the state's largest oyster garden.
He points around the dock.
“Everywhere that you see a cleat there with a rope hanging from it, that's got a cage suspended beneath it,” explained Schlossberg.
That’s the garden — where the spat will stay until they’ve grown into juvenile oysters and moved into an oyster sanctuary, a protected from harvest oyster bed, in the Patapsco River. Earlier in the week, dozens of community volunteers planted cages in the garden as part of the Great Baltimore Oyster Partnership, a joint project between Waterfront Partnership and the Chesapeake Bay Foundation. The program has cultivated an estimated 1.6 million oyster spat in Baltimore’s Harbor since 2013.
Including the students' work, there are now 120 cages at Lighthouse Point.
“They'll all be kind of spread out here along what we call H dock. They go from one end all the way to the other, then they wrap around a little bit down at that far end. And we've kept them all together, so that just makes it easier for the volunteers when they come in to maintain the cages,” Schlossberg explained.
That means they could be preparing thousands of oysters that will eventually go into Bay oyster sanctuaries where they will provide habitat and water filtration by removing excess nitrogen and harmful algae. An adult oyster can filter up to 50 gallons of water each day.
Fiala puts that into perspective: “We're talking like a bathtub- plus size!”
Back at the promenade, students like 11th grader Nathaniel Rubenstein pour the shells into cages where the oysters will spend the next nine months.
“The oysters really like hanging to the cages, including anything, because that that's how they attach their environment and to cluster together is kind of their habit, and so you have to kind of wiggle and shake and pull to make sure they're in these cages,” said Rubenstein, demonstrating said shaking method.
That stacking is what will allow the oysters to form a complex habitat once they make it to the wild. Smithsonian biologists reported earlier this year that oyster sanctuaries are indeed home to increasingly biodiverse wildlife like blue crabs, rockfish and even parasites.
Finally, the moment we came for. The cages are dropped into the harbor with shouts of glee. By the school year’s end, the students will be back to check on their spats.
And hopefully, there in the garden, the oysters will grow.
