The Earth & I Interviews Karl Willey of the Maryland Oyster Restoration Center of the Chesapeake Bay Foundation Oysters have become recognized for their ability to clean water and their role in water ecosystems. Organizations such as the Chesapeake Bay Foundation (CBF) in Maryland have been utilizing oysters for water restoration efforts, particularly in the Chesapeake Bay, America’s largest estuary. Below are edited highlights from Gregg Jones’s interview with Karl Willey, center manager of the Maryland Oyster Restoration Center of the Chesapeake Bay Foundation, in which he discusses the role of oysters and that of his organization in restoring the Chesapeake Bay. What is your role with the CBF (Chesapeake Bay Foundation)? I am the Maryland Oyster Restoration Center Manager. With our oyster restoration coordinator, oyster gardening coordinator, four 3,300-gallon oyster growing tanks, and a sixty-foot oyster seeding boat, we engage hundreds of volunteers to help Save the Bay through oyster restoration activities. At our oyster center, we can grow around twenty million to thirty million [oyster larvae] on shell per year and seed them out onto sanctuary reefs in the Chesapeake Bay and its tributaries. These oyster reefs are protected underwater and will never be harvested legally. We also create Reef Balls with spat [juvenile] oysters on them and start a reef that didn’t exist. I call them “small condos,” with a spat-set of around 1,700 spats per Reef Ball. What is a Reef Ball? A reef ball’s a concrete sphere shaped like an igloo with holes in it. The holes allow fish to swim in and out of it, and it becomes an instant reef once you put spat on it. The third activity is oyster gardening. This involves growing several hundred spat-on-shell in cages the size of a mailbox and placing them off privately owned docks throughout Maryland and Virginia. Volunteers and our other partners will tend to the cages, cleaning them about once a month, and in the process see fish and critters on their own mini reef. The fourth activity is shell recycling by collecting oyster shells from restaurants and people that shuck at their homes. We provide locations for them to donate their shells, pick them up, stockpile them, and we set spat on them in our setting tanks by the next summer. How big of a role does oyster gardening take in terms of the work that you do for reef restoration? It’s a big and important role. It gets the word out to the public that oyster restoration is needed in the Chesapeake Bay. Growing oysters says “I care about the Bay and its critters” to our neighbors, lobbyists, and legislators. People are voting more for restoration work in the Bay and generally want to do more for Saving the Bay. Getting people involved throughout the Chesapeake Bay Watershed in restoration work, whether it’s planting a tree or growing oysters, is a vital part of restoration. It helps us do our job in large-scale restoration efforts. Our volunteers educate our legislators that make political decisions allowing us to build more reefs in our public waters. How long has CBF been involved with oyster restoration in relation to the Chesapeake Bay? We started in 1996 with oyster gardening in Virginia and Maryland. It attracted donors as people saw how effective and exciting oysters are. Donors said they wanted to invest more money into restoration, so we slowly grew larger. CBF invested into a sixty-foot oyster seeding boat that we run named Patricia Campbell, named after donor Keith Campbell’s wife. Historically, what would a natural, pristine oyster reef or tributary look like? What did they look like back in the 1600s before they were damaged by humans? There are very few scriptures, writings, or logs from captains back then describing exactly what they looked like. They could describe them partially by saying that oysters were jetting out from the water at low tide, a ship could run aground on it, and you could eat your fill, and even after your fill, still see billions of oysters out there—a carpet of oysters. Building up to that would be almost impossible today, but what we can do is start it by putting oysters on the bottom of the Bay, based on oyster reef charts done by the state of Maryland in 1905. That’s where the partnership starts between nonprofits like the Chesapeake Bay Foundation and local, state, and federal agencies. The University of Maryland (UMD) and Virginia Institute of Marine Science (VIMS) scientists survey the bottom to find out where we could rebuild reefs. Then the Army Corps of Engineers and Maryland’s Department of Natural Resources (DNR) will place the substrate, whether it be shell, rock, or crushed concrete, on the bottom. After putting the substrate down, other partners like the Chesapeake Bay Foundation and Oyster Recovery Partnership will seed the reefs with millions of spat-on-shell. Scientists later monitor the bottom and find out how it did. More than fifty adult oysters per square meter is considered a healthy oyster reef. It may take a decade to get reef like hills underwater. What you really need in a reef is a three-dimensional structure that would filter the Bay, provide habitat, and help break up the stratification in the water, allowing more oxygen to be pulled down from the top to the bottom, minimizing the dead zones in Chesapeake Bay that kill fish during the summertime. I think that is vitally important. What you really need in a reef is a three-dimensional structure that would filter the Bay, provide habitat, and help break up the stratification in the water. The second bonus you get out of the 3D structure of an oyster reef is that it breaks up big waves during storm events. Right now, we have a lot of shoreline erosion and land loss along waterfronts. Big catastrophic events like hurricanes can cause significantly more damage without the oyster reefs there to dampen down the larger waves. Reefs play an important role in protecting fish and other critters, water quality, and shorelines. Yes, there also isn’t much vegetation, right? Right. If you have a hard shoreline, it makes it worse. A marsh or beach would look more natural and inviting in front of a home. Oysters are analogous to the coral reefs in the Caribbean, the beautiful reefs you see when you go snorkeling in the blue water. All the fish live around it, but, once you swim away from it, you see very few fish by the sandy bottom. Life is similar in the Chesapeake Bay. Oysters are the Bay’s reefs. If you take all the oysters out of the Bay, then you just have sand and mud. There really isn’t much left in the Bay, thus making the oyster a keystone species. Without the oyster reef, many fish species would not exist in the Chesapeake Bay. A rockfish, for example, loves rock. If you remove an oyster reef, which is oyster rock to some fish, a rockfish would be less likely to live there. They travel there to spawn but wouldn’t if it weren’t for the oysters. Other critters that live in the oyster reef are important, such as the oyster toad fish that lives on the bottom in an oyster reef with the goby, blenny, and skilletfish. There’s a long list of such species. And on the bottom under a reef there’s the benthic of organisms that benefit from the waste from oysters. Exactly how do oysters benefit the Bay? When an oyster eats, it filters everything out of the water. It grabs all of it and filters it into its system. And it identifies what it doesn’t like and packages it up into a pseudo-feces and distributes it on the bottom where other organisms will consume it. For algae and things it likes, the oyster will send them through its gut and digest them, which then becomes feces on the bottom that other organisms will consume. So, oysters clean the water column, whether it be dirt, suspended solids, or algae. One large adult oyster over three inches can filter up to fifty gallons of water per day. You could deploy ten billion oysters in the Bay for restoration activities. With that amount of energy in the water, oysters can filter out a lot of suspended solids and clean the Bay. When did scientists first see the decline of the oysters and have concern? There’s actually an interesting book called The Oyster: A Popular Summary Of A Scientific Study (1891). It was written back in 1891 by William Keith Brooks, one of the oyster commissioners for the state of Maryland who was in charge of watching over the oyster population. It was a huge industry; people made millions of dollars off the oysters in the Chesapeake Bay. The commissioner saw the oyster depletion and wrote the book. Ken Paynter, a scientist through the University of Maryland, wrote the foreword on a reprint, which came out about a hundred years later. Brooks reflected that oysters are having problems and we could fix it now if we take certain steps, but it did not happen. One of the ideas is relevant today in Virginia: using rotational reefs. If a healthy reef gets down to around ten oysters per square meter, they’ll close that reef from harvest and let it grow back. And maybe in three years they will open it back up again after a survey. That is what Brooks recommended. Back then in the 1800s, they had a lot more oyster larvae floating in the water column that could rehabilitate and reseed itself. If the watermen replaced the shells back in the water and the spat settled on it, harvest could happen in two years. You could then continue harvesting as long as you don’t overharvest. He saw the writing on the wall. He wrote that book while he still was a commissioner and got fired. To answer your question of when scientists first recognized the issue, I don’t even know. Somewhere in the 1800s, Connecticut area oystermen overharvested the oysters and basically didn’t have anything else to harvest. The tool they had up in Connecticut was the dredge. They brought down the dredge to the Chesapeake Bay, and very quickly Maryland saw it was an efficient tool and made a law that prohibited dredging in the Chesapeake Bay unless you were a Maryland resident. So, Connecticut oystermen became Maryland residents. Overharvesting oysters and oyster diseases in the 1950s changed some harvesting rules. Today, most large dredges are only used on skipjacks to harvest on public oyster bars. What are some of the hurdles that have been encountered and overcome to restore oyster populations? Challenges in oyster restoration include climate change, sea level rise, water quality, and oyster diseases. There’s still poaching going on in certain areas of the Bay, which is a challenge for our DNR police. Other challenges include the cost of doing restoration correctly and the limitation on shell. Shell—that used to be free—is valuable now. People would give you bushels of shell when I first started restoration, but now it costs over $7 a bushel. Many watermen want to get involved in oyster aquaculture, but there is a cost to set spat-on-shell and put it in the water. That's another hurdle, the sheer cost and volume of work, but I see it getting easier in Maryland. The state has set aside an oyster aquaculture division within the Department of Natural Resources that helps the watermen/farmers. DNR can make it quicker and less expensive to get involved in oyster aquaculture. The state needs to invite more watermen and other people switching over from wild oyster harvesting to oyster aquaculture, which is more sustainable. We have very few wild oysters left in the Chesapeake Bay. Like old growth forests, some are in our oyster sanctuaries. These old reefs have tolerated diseases, water quality changes, and climate changes, and our new reefs can benefit from their offspring, creating more resilient reefs in the Bay. It seems it’s quite a collaborative effort between the state, DNR, universities, and nonprofits. Absolutely. We also have the public volunteering and voting, legislators creating new laws, and the watermen with extended knowledge. Watermen help in the restoration work. They’ll hire their boats out to pull up oysters and do monitoring plus seeding oysters back into the Bay. There are multiple sectors in the oyster industry that are helpful. And they know they need to do the right thing to keep oysters in the Bay for generations to come. Where does Maryland stand in relation to other oyster restoration efforts in the US and globally? I’m pretty sure that the Chesapeake Bay is the leader of oyster restoration in the world. Other countries have been doing oyster aquaculture for hundreds of years, some being in Europe and Asia. Many efforts in oyster farming have been made, but restoration is a growing trend. Being one of the largest restoration efforts in the world, it’s not done perfectly. It’s done the best we can and we learn, but, quite honestly, it has ended up going very well. Especially the first oyster sanctuary we finished at Harris Creek that met the fifty oysters per square meter mark. It is doing quite well and will be studied for years to come. What are some of the target goals of the efforts here in Maryland and Virginia? I know you have ten tributaries, right? Yes, that goal is ten tributaries, five in Maryland and five in Virginia by the year 2025, and we’re almost there. If you go out [in Virginia] and monitor their reefs over a season, more than likely they will get a natural spat set in those reefs. Just about every year or every other year, they’ll get one with a nice spat set, but it’s a little harder in Maryland. We’ve got to have the right salinity, so the upper reaches of the lower salinity areas may not a get a natural strike every year or a heavy set. It’s a little heavier lift up here to get a reef to sustain itself without the help of re-seeding it every couple years. But at some point, the “tipping point” will be reached. Finally, can an individual get involved in oyster gardening to help the restoration work? Yes. If somebody wants to do it on a larger scale, we’ll work with them and give them the equipment they need. You can send an email to marylandoystergardening@cbf.org. *Gregg Jones is the outreach director of the Hyo Jeong International Foundation for the Unity of the Sciences (HJIFUS), the publisher of The Earth & I.

According to NASA, June 2022 was tied with 2020 as the hottest global June since record-keeping began in 1880. Was it really? Depends on who you ask, says Yale Climate Connections (YCC). Was June 2022 Really the Hottest? NASA reported in July that June 2022 was 1.18℃ above the “pre-industrial” temperatures of 1880-1920. NOAA disagreed, ranking June 2022 as the sixth warmest June on record. The EU’s Copernicus Climate Change Service (CCCS) declared June 2022 as the third-warmest June on record. The Japan Meteorological Agency agreed with the CCCS’s ranking. The differences between the various agency rankings weren’t very big, says YCC. They were “separated by only 0.08 degree Celsius (0.14°F) in the NOAA database,” says YCC contributor, Jeff Masters. What accounts for the differences? It depends on how the agencies “treat data-sparse regions such as the Arctic,” says Masters. Source: https://yaleclimateconnections.org/2022/07/nasa-june-2022-tied-as-earths-warmest-june-on-record/

Life expectancy has dropped for all racial groups, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Center for Health Statistics said in an August 2022 report. Overall at-birth life expectancy in the US fell by nine months from 2020 to 2021. The decline of 77.0 years to 76.1 years brought US life expectancy to its lowest level since 1996. The 2021 drop, combined with a 1.8 year drop in 2020, is “the biggest two-year decline in life expectancy” since the early 1920s. American Indian-Alaskan Native people (AIAN) saw the biggest drop in life expectancy—nearly two years—to 65.2 years in 2021. This was equal to the life expectancy of the total U.S. population in 1944. Non-Hispanic Whites had the second-largest decline, from 77.4 years in 2020 to 76.4 years in 2021. Non-Hispanic Blacks saw a seven-month drop from 71.5 years in 2020 to 70.8 in 2021. Following a four-year drop in life expectancy from 2019 to 2020, Hispanics saw a slight two-month decline in 2021, to 77.7 years. Life expectancy for Asians saw a one-month drop, to 83.5 years. The life expectancy gap for men and women grew slightly, from 5.7 years in 2020 to 5.9 years in 2021. COVID-19 deaths contributed to 74% of the decline from 2019 to 2020. Sources: Provisional Life Expectancy Estimates for 2021. https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/nchs_press_releases/2022/20220831.htm

Typhoon Merbok struck the western shore of Alaska on Sept. 17, 2022. Due to unusually warm ocean temperatures, Merbok was born near Japan, where typhoons that strike Alaska rarely begin, and propelled eastward to become one of the worst storms on record to hit the state. As Merbok moved eastward toward Alaska, its waves surpassed 50 feet in the nearby Bering Sea. Water levels near Nome, Alaska, were 10.52 feet above the low tide line. That height was only surpassed once before, by the worst storm on record in November 1974. However, Merbok was by far the strongest to strike in early autumn. The storm impacted hundreds of miles of coastline from north of Bristol Bay to just beyond the Bering Strait. CBS News reported that the storm was vast enough to cover the US mainland from the Pacific Ocean to Nebraska and from Canada to Texas, with effects felt as far away as California. Alaska’s subsistence economy was especially impacted as evidenced by a lost protective berm in the village of Shaktoolik. Rebuilding from storms is especially challenging for remote regions of Alaska. Source: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/alaska-flooding-typhoon-merbok-today-2022-09-18/

Global data from WHO and UNICEF finds household access to clean water, sanitation, and hygiene remains a challenge in parts of the world. In 2020, 90% of the world’s population had access to at least “basic” drinking water services, such as pipes and wells. This was up from 88% in 2015. However, 2 billion people lack access to “safely managed” domestic drinking water, or water that is clean, uncontaminated, and accessible at home. About 80% of people who lack drinking water services live in rural areas. Some 2.3 billion people lack soap and water at home, including 670 million people with no handwashing facilities. Some 3.6 billion people, or almost half the world population, lack safe sanitation at home. Almost 500 million people still practice open defecation. Millions suffer worldwide from neglected tropical diseases (NTDs), many of which are water-related or hygiene-related. One such disease is Trachoma, the world’s leading cause of preventable blindness. Forty-one million people are estimated to suffer from active trachoma, with about 10 million visually impaired or irreversibly blind as a result. Global access to safe drinking water, sanitation and hygiene could reduce the burden of global disease by 10%. Improved sanitation between 2000 and 2016 contributed to a 10% decrease in diarrheal deaths globally, and a 15% decrease in diarrheal deaths in Southeast Asia, East Asia, and Oceania. Source: https://www.cdc.gov/healthywater/global/wash_statistics.html

Nigeria has endured prolonged flooding since September 2022, described by The New York Times as its worst in a decade. UNICEF (The United Nations Children's Fund) has provided updated reports on the impacts of the flooding, especially on Nigeria’s children. In a November 2022 update, UNICEF reported that the flooding had impacted 3.2 million people. Of those, 1.9 million were children. Children make up 60% of Nigeria’s population. Some 1.4 million people had been displaced by the flooding. More than 600 people died due to the flooding. The heavy rainfall and flooded rivers have damaged water systems, and sanitation facilities, raising the risks for disease transmission. Thirty-four of Nigeria’s 36 states were affected. According to the report, “UNICEF, in coordination with the Government, NGOs and other UN agencies, is scaling up an integrated emergency response.” It is to be implemented from October 2022 to March 2023. Source: https://reliefweb.int/report/nigeria/unicef-nigeria-flash-update-flood-september-november-2022

New research finds that moving food from farms to consumers generates higher-than-expected CO2 carbon emissions. Nature reported in July 2022 that about one-fifth of all carbon emissions linked to the food system came from transportation—“a much bigger slice of the emissions pie than previously thought.” The study from the University of Sydney in Australia collected data from 74 countries and regions. It found that food transportation in 2017 added equivalent CO2 emissions of about 3.0 gigatons. That is 7.5 times previous estimates. Developed nations, which have about 12% of the global population, generated nearly half of international food-transport emissions. Low-income countries, which have about half of the global population, generated about 20% of international food-transport emissions. Transporting fruit and vegetables generated double the amount of CO2 produced by growing them. Source: https://www.nature.com/articles/s43016-022-00531-w

New Study Shows Doctors Less Likely to Follow Guidelines When Taking Medication It might be reasonable to expect medical doctors and their family members to follow established guidelines when taking prescription drugs. However, according to a December 2022 report in Science Daily, a new study using Swedish data has challenged that assumption. According to study co-author and MIT economist, Dr. Amy Finkelstein, “You should see the most adherence when you look at patients who are physicians or their close relatives. We were struck to find that the opposite holds, that physicians and their close relatives are less likely to adhere to their own medication guidelines." Despite doctors having advanced knowledge and easy access to other medical providers, the study shows that the general Swedish population stuck to medication guidelines 54.4% of the time, while doctors and their families did so 50.6% of the time. The paper, "A Taste of Their Own Medicine: Guideline Adherence and Access to Expertise," was published in the American Economic Review: Insights. Finkelstein’s co-authors included Petra Persson, an assistant professor of economics at Stanford University; Maria Polyakova, PhD, an assistant professor of health policy at the Stanford University School of Medicine; and Jesse M. Shapiro, the George Gund Professor of Economics and Business Administration at Harvard University. The team examined Swedish data from 2005 through 2016 with research involving 5,887,471 people. Of those, 149,399 were doctors or their close family members. Armed with their surprising research results, the team tried to identify the cause of the lapse in doctor adherence. Their conclusion was that doctors possess "superior information about guidelines" for prescription drugs and consequently apply that information to themselves. The largest adherence gap in the study involved antibiotics: According to Science Daily, “doctors and their families are 5.2 percentage points less in compliance [in the case of antibiotics] than everyone else.” Sources: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2022/12/221216142638.htm https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/aeri.20210591

Breakthrough Study Examines Ice Cores to Determine Frequent Weather Patterns University of Colorado Boulder researchers and a team of international scientists have collaborated to reveal 11,000 years of Earth’s climatic history by studying Antarctic ice cores, according to a January 2023 report in Science Daily. Published on January 11, 2023, in Nature, the study is the first of its kind to determine seasonal temperature records dating to the onset of the period known as the Holocene. Though scientists have long studied polar ice cores for atmospheric data over extended periods of time, this was the first study to determine annual summer and winter temperatures—a frequency never before achieved. How did they do it? The team relied on recent technological developments and a few innovations of their own. Tyler Jones, lead author on the study, and assistant research professor and fellow at the Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research (INSTAAR), said that the research team’s goal was to “push the boundaries of what is possible with past climate interpretations.” “For us,” he said, "that meant trying to understand climate at the shortest timescales—in this case seasonally, from summer to winter, year-by-year, for many thousands of years." According to Science Daily, the study also validates one aspect of a long-standing theory that has not been previously proven: how seasonal temperatures in polar regions respond to what are known as Milankovitch cycles, hypothetical “collective effects of changes in Earth's position relative to the sun due to slow variations of its orbit and axis.” "I am particularly excited that our result confirms a fundamental prediction of the theory used to explain Earth's ice-age climate cycles: that the intensity of sunlight controls summertime temperatures in the polar regions, and thus melt of ice, too," said Kurt Cuffey, a co-author on the study and professor at the University of California, Berkeley. This new access to more highly detailed data on past climate patterns should also help researchers study the impacts of anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions on Earth’s present and future climate. By understanding naturally occurring planetary cycles, scientists can do a better job of identifying human influences on climate and temperatures. "This research is something that humans can really relate to because we partly experience the world through the changing seasons—documenting how summer and winter temperature varied through time translates to how we understand climate," said Jones. Study co-authors Bruce Vaughn, a chief scientist on the project and manager of the Stable Isotope Lab, and Bradley Markle, assistant professor at INSTAAR and the Department of Geology, collected the West Antarctica ice that was shipped for analysis. Next on the team's agenda is an attempt to analyze ice cores from similar locales, such as the South Pole and northeast Greenland, where ice cores have previously been drilled. Source: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2023/01/230111131458.htm

North Korea, a mountainous nation of 25.7 million people with a land area of 120,410 sq/km, had 80% tree coverage in 1945. By 2000, tree coverage dropped to 30% or 5.1 million ha (around 20,000 square miles). Tree coverage loss continued for two decades, shrinking by 248,259 ha (958 square miles) by 2022. Recorded tree cover loss was highest in 2019, with 27,492 ha or 106 square miles of loss. Scientific American reported that the North Korean government “acknowledges that forest cover shrank sharply during a famine in the 1990s, going from 8.3 million hectares to 7.6 million hectares in just a few years.” The same report cited a 2014 study showing that North Korean forests were “becoming more fragmented, with less contiguous tree cover.” Sources: https://www.jstor.org/stable/43908904, https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/with-widespread-deforestation-north-korea-faces-an-environmental-crisis/ https://rainforests.mongabay.com/deforestation/archive/North_Korea.htm

On February 24, 2022, the Russian military invaded Ukraine, causing “the most rapid forced population movement within Europe since World War 2.” Researchers addressed the humanitarian and environmental impacts of the war in a new study in The Lancet. As of Aug. 10, 2022, 12,867 civilian casualties were reported in Ukraine, including 5,401 deaths. According to the UN, 972 of those deaths were children. Over 6 million people became registered refugees in Europe alone. Some 6 million people have been internally displaced, and this number could be closer to 8 million. War has devastated Ukraine's infrastructure, causing disruption to vital services such as waste management and agriculture. It has caused environmental contamination that includes toxic chemical releases from damaged industrial facilities. Ukraine’s fifteen reactors at four operational nuclear power plants raises grave concerns, as do radioactive sources at other sites. Source: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(22)01739-1/fulltext

COVID-19 stay-at-home measures inspired an uptick in home gardening in the US, according to an article in the consumer advocate publication Consumer Affairs. Researchers at the University of Georgia surveyed more than 4,200 households about their gardening activities prior to, during, and after the COVID-19 pandemic. The UG researchers found a new interest in gardening but warned the gardening industry that the trend may not last. Almost 35% of the survey respondents reported taking up gardening because they were spending more time at home. Over 40% of respondents reported an increase in their usual gardening habits. This included an increase in garden-related purchases. Some 62% of respondents said they intended to return to pre-pandemic purchasing levels. The remaining 38% intended to maintain their post-pandemic purchasing levels. Millennials and those born in 1985 or after were more likely to have started gardening during the pandemic. Millennials and younger respondents were also more likely to discontinue gardening once things returned to normal. Sources: https://journals.ashs.org/horttech/view/journals/horttech/32/1/article-p32.xml https://www.consumeraffairs.com/news/covid-19-pandemic-sparked-increase-in-gardening-sales-study-finds-032222.html