Cleaning the Bay, Chesapeake Bay USA

There are edible oysters and pearl-producing oysters, and now, there are environmentally conscious oysters that may play a key role in reducing some of the water quality problems plaguing the Chesapeake Bay. Excessive nutrient concentration has stimulated an overgrowth of microscopic plants in the bay, and scientists point to nitrogen and phosphorous as the major culprits. This nutrient pollution comes from sources ranging from wastewater treatment plants and septic tanks to fertilizer and manure runoff from farms, and from atmospheric deposition from burning fossil fuels.

Now a team of researchers from Virginia Commonwealth University and Virginia Tech has shown how to directly quantify the nutrient removal capacity of aquacultured oysters as a means to offset those sources. As they grow, oysters remove nitrogen-containing compounds from the water. These nutrients are then permanently removed from the water-system when the oysters are harvested and sold to the seafood market.

In a study, published online in the January-February issue of the Journal of Environmental Quality, Colleen Higgins, a Ph.D. life sciences candidate, her mentor and corresponding author for the study, Bonnie Brown, Ph.D., professor and associate chair for the VCU Department of Biology, and economist Kurt Stephenson, Ph.D., with the Department of Agricultural and Applied Economics at Virginia Tech, reported that they could estimate this nutrient removal mechanism with a high degree of confidence by measuring the shell length of aquacultured oysters. Read more...

This blog is written by Martin Little The Aquaculturists, published and supported by the International Aquafeed Magazine from Perendale Publishers.