Lab-grown baby oysters, shipments of empty shells and muddy boots: Those are some of the ingredients that have made restoring the Olympia oyster successful in Fidalgo Bay.
Where overharvesting and water pollution in the 1900s left few, if any, Olympia oysters — a species once as integral to West Coast ecosystems as Pacific salmon and Dungeness crab — in the local bay there are now an estimated 4.5 acres populated by the native shellfish.
Since the estimated number of the oysters climbed into the millions in 2015, the population has remained strong. There are now an estimated 3 million of them in Fidalgo Bay waters.
“We pretty much hit a point where it looks like things are self sustaining,” said project lead Paul Dinnel, who is a retired marine scientist. “In general it has been very good with natural recruitment in the last half dozen years or so.”
That means oysters put in the bay through the project have successfully produced young, and those young have found new homes on shell, rock and other hard surfaces.
In some places, project partners — including the Puget Sound Restoration Fund and Skagit Marine Resources Committee — coaxed those baby oysters to take hold. Most recently, the partners dispersed empty Pacific oyster shells over about an acre of the bay’s muddy bottom in 2018.
In other places the oysters have made their own way with the help of tides and gulls. Tides can carry young oysters to new areas and gulls can drop empty shells that serve as new real estate.
Dinnel said during a recent online talk hosted by the Padilla Bay Foundation that there’s now interest in expanding restoration of the native oyster to other local waters.
“This might be a prime area for getting some Olympia oysters out in Padilla Bay,” Dinnel said as he showed a photo of channels slicing through the mud flats of the southern portion of the bay at low tide.
To find out for sure, Dinnel and Padilla Bay National Estuarine Research Reserve staff need to traverse the channels by kayak and muddy more boots. They need to determine whether there’s suitable Olympia oyster habitat.
“We were on tap for getting out there this summer … but then COVID-19 hit and plans kind of went awry as field work was put on hold,” Dinnel said. “So that’s still on tap for the future.”
For now, the estimated 4.5 acres where Olympia oysters are believed to be thriving in Fidalgo Bay is a drop in the bucket compared to estimates of what the species once inhabited — 2,000 acres in Padilla Bay and another 2,000 acres in neighboring Samish Bay.
