The Incredible Oyster Reef

[Music] it's just a pile of 17th century kitchen garbage like many found along the shores of Chesapeake Bay the colonists ate a lot of oysters and fish what you got there bones from one fish are by far the most common among the oyster shells oh cool that's a a sheep's head jaw pone it's a tasty fish called a sheep's head and it thrived in the diverse and productive habitat of an oyster [Music] Reef ever wonder why you seldom see an oyster off by itself here's an animal that prefers company lots of company but it's no party animal kind of a stiff actually in time it may open up a bit but it definitely doesn't get around so how the do oysters get together in the first place how do they build a reef okay imagine it's springtime somewhere below the Bay's surface an especially eager male oyster senses the rising temperature and just right salinity suddenly eons of evolution kick in and a few million oyster sperms start looking for love drifting through the reef they set off nearby males while the females respond too sending bursts of eggs into the mix the spawn like a chain reaction sweeps through the reef somehow sperm finds egg and in no time a brood of baby oysters begins life drifting on the tide the larv quickly develop organs a protective shell even a crude ability to move up and down this vertical mobility is key as they Meander above the bottom sometimes for Miles the larv sense a chemical that oyster reefs emit that's their signal to settle down after just a couple of weeks or so of Freedom the lucky ones find attached to and start growing right on another oyster shell stuck together for better or worse for life and that's how Wild oysters make an oyster Reef oyster upon oyster year after Year from the bottom [Music] up Native Americans called it Chesapeake great shellfish Bay clumped together the higher density of oysters favored natural reproduction indeed they thrived in the shallow tide swept edges building up reefs some so high the E tide left them dry these were formidable self-repairing structures that channeled currents and protected marshes from erosion they stabilized bottom sediments improving water Clarity near light sensitive grass beds and the reefs were home to more than oysters an entire ecosystem evolved its creatures adapted to the dynamic conditions of an estuary where the Salty Sea mixed with Mighty sediment Laden Rivers where fresh water off the land brought lifegiving organic particles to the reef and from time to time smothered it in silt of course this silt is what settles out to form the soft and flat bottom of the bay a great place for worms that burrow down but life has a way of expanding wherever it can and so the oyster The Reef Builder adapted to this sediment-rich environment by going its own way up an oyster Reef with its clean hard surfaces an intricate three-dimensional structure attracts a wide variety of Life surrounded by flat bottom The Reef offers valuable cover to small fish like pipe fish and juveniles of game species like Atlantic kroer as adults the Croakers return to the reef looking for prey but the scaleless naked GOI is a master of Duck and Cover quite at home in the Reef's nooks and crannies so too are the feather blenny and the striped blenny who always seem to be defending their territories with its oyster Reef camo the skillet fish employs a buil-in suction cup to hide upside down all are true residents of the reef laying their eggs in open shells just big enough to squeeze into but not so big as to tempt Predators one visitor the northern puffer eats soft shell crabs when threatened it puffs up hoping it looks too big to be swallowed a staple in the diet of many fish the common grass shrimp is considered a good indicator of reef [Music] health and crabs of every size are here this Marsh crab dines on organic debris at top a large living oyster and it finds an empty shell the perfect place to Mt the occasional blue crab a formidable Predator might be found lurking in the shadows like the oyster toad fish and the eel these are opportunists looking for an easy meal there seems to be life and the struggle for Life everywhere some 300 species of plants and animals depend on the reef and one another in an intricate Web of Life incredibly the very Foundation of this web is a group of plants quite invisible to the naked eye fueled by the Sun and parading endlessly through the reef phytoplankton often called algae are the primary food source for many of the Reef's creatures these so-called filter feeders have evolved highly specialized means of capturing suspended Plankton among the tiniest of these filter feeders are the encrusting Brians the animal itself is microscopic but you can spot the strikingly geometric coral-like homes they drape across oyster shells nearby tiny mudw worms and delicate sea anemones sweep up unseen Plankton the ordinary Barnacle deploys An Elegant fan to snare bits of organic matter out of the current clusters of hooked muscles are common on the reef it's an efficient consumer of picoplankton a type of algae too small for oysters to filter well like the oyster it separates out what it wants for food mostly algae and eliminates the rest onto the reef food wants again for small crabs worms and microbes below but when it comes to sheer filtering power the mighty oyster has no match mature and healthy a single oyster can pump 50 gallons a day through its gills removing not only algae but sediment as well as the first colonists arrived oysters were so abundant it's estimated they could filter a volume of water equal to the entire Bay in just a few days the reefs were living self- sustaining water filtration facilities teeming with Filter feeders they took in nutrient-rich Bay water used it to grow and sent it back out cleaner in effect a check and balance on algae and suspended sediments in the [Music] bay but as the human footprint on land grew this delicate balance began to fail polluted with excess nutrients like nitrogen and phosphorus in fertilizers baywaters now grow too much algae which eventually dies and decays depleting the oxygen that other creatures need to survive loss of forest land and inadequate erosion control leave oyster beds silted over and oyster larv with no place to set and of course we ate the oysters too now oyster abundance is but a fraction of historic levels when oysters could filter the entire Bay in just a few days the capacity of the few remaining reefs to improve water quality is greatly diminished repeatedly scraped bear from over harvesting few unprotected reefs rise from the bottom or support diverse communities of organisms a vital organ of the bay ecosystem the wild oyster Reef has been pushed to the brink perhaps the sheep's head is just collateral damage but its disappearance from most of the bay shows just how interlocked the ecosystem is damage one part and you damage the whole without steps to save wild oysters the entire Chesapeake region risks the permanent loss of not only the Bay's iconic shellfish but also a healthy Bay a healthy economy and a healthy way of [Music] [Music] life [Music]

Channel: Chesapeake Bay Foundation

Views: 135,414

Keywords: oysters Chesapeake Bay reef

Id: 9V3yjCplc44

Length: 10min 8sec (608 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 21 2017