Appreciated by the gastronomers, the oyster could also be one of the soldiers that the world needs to combat environmental degradation. Kimberly Price is convinced of this, she, who, with other volunteers, tries to influence the populations of these seas cleaners.
This Maryland resident, in the east of the United States, breeds thousands of oysters at home located next to the water. When they are mature enough, mollusks are introduced into Chesapeake Bay, near Washington DC, where they clean the water. Oysters are extremely effective natural filters, each can treat up to 190 liters of water per day. The habitat is assault, the flora of the sea and fauna are better, which, according to experts, can also help the waters to capture more carbon dioxide responsible for global warming.
Thousands of millions before
Today, there are only 1% of the native oysters of the Chesapeake Bay that was found by thousands of millions before the 1880s, enough to filter all the water in the bay, according to historians. They were victims of contamination, overfishing and diseases.
Environmentalists face a colossal challenge and volunteers like Kimberly Price play a crucial role in the repopulation of the bay. For nine months, youth oysters are raised in cages suspended by ropes with the private dock of Kimberly Price, a 53 -year real estate consultant, to give them so many possibilities to grow. Then, the mollusks get to work to help preserve the planet.
“We, humans, destroy everything, right? So, we see how to rectify the situation,” Kimberly Price told AFP while fishermen hover over their heads. In the cage hit by the inscription “forbidden for sales and human consumption”, the old oyster shells serve as a bed for half a dozen small mollusks the size of a nail. When they arrived in Kimberly Price last summer, they were barely larger than the pins, of a specialized hatching.
During the AFP visit at the end of May, Kimberly Price washed the young oysters before giving them to the Chesapeake Bay Foundation (CBF) that introduces them to the sanctuary reef in the bay, where mollusc fishing is prohibited. In 2018, the non -profit organization and its partners have established the objective of implementing 10 billion new oysters in the bay, the largest estuary of the United States, at the end of 2025.
Small concrete iglios
About 6.7 billion have already been introduced, according to Kellie Fiala, an expert in CBF. The population “evolves in a positive direction,” he adds. “When we think of the number of oysters in the bay, we still have a long way to go,” he said. One of the main difficulties is the lack of substrate, of hard equipment that oysters need to grow because for years, the shells were collected to serve to build alleys.
To solve the problem, the CBF encourages volunteers to make specific types of Iglú to serve as artificial habitats under water. All these initiatives promote the participation of local residents, from schools to retirees.
With other volunteers, Kimberly Price goes to the headquarters of CBF near the bay to leave cubes of mollusks, 7,500 according to a count. Then, the oysters are loaded in a small boat that the captain, Dan Johannes, 61, a pilot until they reach a sanctuary reef. There, two empty apprentices without ceremony about twenty cubes on the board. The process only lasts one minute and the bay contains 75,000 more oysters.
Source: BFM TV
