Since the beginning of 2013, the Oyster Reef Project—a partnership between SMRWA, Leonardtown Rotary Club, and St. Mary’s College of Maryland—has restored nearly five acres of crucial habitat in the St. Mary’s River oyster sanctuary.
Within the restoration site, located adjacent to St. Mary’s College of Maryland, twenty-three concrete reef ball mounds, two shell piles, and thirteen concrete rubble mounds have been constructed, requiring 603 reef balls, 270 bushels of oyster shell, nearly 190 tons of concrete rubble.
Reef mounds are built to within one foot of mean low water and range from four feet to seven feet in height. Half of the reefs are treated with oyster shell to attract natural recruitment or with spat raised in our nursery.
Saturday’s project was our thirty-eight reef mound on this site and was built with twenty-two tons of “rip-rap” rock. Students from the local schools monitor and execute experiments on the reefs to determine which methods are ecologically most successful. A control site is adjacent to the reefs and is built in the traditional flat bar method.
Boeing is the primary funder of our oyster reef project. As a part of their annual community service day, Boeing volunteers came out to build this new oyster mound. Within a couple months it will be colonized by oysters and other aquatic wildlife.