Cambridge, Md. (March 4, 2009) – Today the Maryland Board of Public Works approved a contract allowing the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science to move forward with the construction of a state-of-the-art oyster cultivation facility at the Horn Point Laboratory in Cambridge. The new facility will significantly increase the Center’s ability to produce oyster spat for the State’s Chesapeake Bay restoration efforts.
The oyster cultivation facility will rest on a 300-foot pier reaching into the Choptank River and will improve the efficiency of large-scale restoration efforts by allowing researchers to more easily move spat-laden oyster shell to barges destined for restoration sites. The construction of the facility will be managed by the Maryland Department of General Services and is expected to be completed in fall 2010.
“The new oyster cultivation facility removes a bottleneck in the production of oyster spat for Bay restoration,” said UMCES President Dr. Donald Boesch. “The new facility will allow the Center’s researchers to ramp-up restoration efforts by annually producing one- to two-billion spat-on-shell for placement in the Bay and its rivers.”
The Center’s oyster hatchery produced 580 million oyster spat in 2008, a record number for the facility. After rearing oysters in the hatchery, the Center works with the State of Maryland and the Oyster Recovery Partnership to place the spat-on-shell at designated sites throughout the Bay.
The University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science is the University System of Maryland’s premier environmental research institution. UMCES researchers are helping improve our scientific understanding of Maryland, the region and the world through its three laboratories – Chesapeake Biological Laboratory in Solomons, Appalachian Laboratory in Frostburg, and Horn Point Laboratory in Cambridge – and the Maryland Sea Grant College.
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