If you or your organization is interested in adopting a recruitment monitoring site, please reach out to us! It is fascinating to see which embayments are the big performers from year to year! Recruitment monitoring at far-flung places would not be possible without the help of our many partners.Ĭlick here to view a map of our recruitment stations. This provides a snapshot of oyster population dynamics at sites all around the Sound, which in turn helps us make decisions about where to focus our restoration efforts. We can then count how many juvenile Olympia oysters have settled on each shell face at each recruitment station. To track recruitment in locations of interest around Puget Sound, we deploy recruitment stations (stacked Pacific oyster shells on wooden dowels) in early summer, when Olympia oysters typically begin to spawn, and collect the stations in early fall. “Recruits” are juvenile oysters that settle onto substrate and grow into adult members of the population. It has expanded every year since thanks to many partners. PSRF began the Olympia oyster Recruitment Monitoring program in 2014. ![]() Last stop? Back out onto the tideflats to jump-start our native oyster populations! To learn a bit more, enjoy an oldie, but goodie – this short videoof our 2011-2012 restoration work in Port Gamble Bay. The oysters are fed throughout the process with a well-balanced diet of microalgae that we produce in our Greenhouse. For the latter, we pump the larval oysters into large setting tanks filled with bags of Pacific oyster shell, which the larvae settle onto. Next, we induce spawning in the broodstock, and then capture and rear the resulting larvae, either as single oysters, or as spat-on-shell. Chew Center for Shellfish Research and Restorationat NOAA’s Manchester Research Station, which serves as a hub for producing millions of baby oysters for outplanting. This broodstock is then brought to our conservation hatchery, the Kenneth K. We first collect broodstock Olympia oysters from geographic basins in which we have restoration projects planned. One of the primary ways we do this is by producing restoration-grade Olympia oyster seed for outplanting into the wild. Our objective is to increase the number of oysters until populations become self-sustaining. Olympia oysters are sparsely distributed across most of their historic range. Read on to learn more about the components of our program, browse additional resources, and learn more about our partners and funders. A special thanks is owed to all of the writers, reporters, videographers and storytellers who have chronicled the many stages of this wonderful journey. ![]() Our larger galaxy of Olympia oyster partners is listed below. A core team advises this work, including: Washington Department of Fish & Wildlife, NOAA, Baywater, Inc., University of Washington, Swinomish Tribe, and Northwest Straits Commission. All told, these actions help implement specific recommendations of both the Blue Ribbon Panel on Ocean Acidification and the Washington Shellfish Initiative. This is an important precursor to restoring oyster bed habitat in areas where Olympia oysters have been lost. The hatchery enables us to produce and outplant Olympia oyster seed in priority areas in order to re-establish breeding populations. ![]() In addition to managing larger-scale, on-the-ground work to restore oyster bed habitat, PSRF operates a conservation hatcherywith NOAA, established in 2014. After all, who wouldn’t want to recover living shorelines full of historic resources of ecological and cultural importance? So, we’ve basically been running to keep up with this project ever since. We learned quickly that LOTS of people wanted to engage in rebuilding our beloved native oyster, for all kinds of reasons. Fledgling efforts began in 1999, guided by Washington Department of Fish & Wildlife’s 1998 Olympia oyster stock rebuilding plan. Olympia oyster restoration in Puget Sound is a BIG, collective enterprise inspired and powered by Tribes, shellfish growers, federal, state, and local agencies, foundations, Marine Resources Committees, tideland owners, and countless others. Collaborative rebuilding efforts are a reflection of that. Olympia oysters are big players in our ecosystem, culture, and history here in Washington, notwithstanding their diminutive size.
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