♪♪
-Samish Bay,
200 years ago
had about 2000 acres of dense Olympia oyster beds.
Enough Olympia oysters here,
not just to provide a first food
for all of the tribes and first nations that lived here,
but also dense enough to provide structured habitat.
Structured Olympia oyster beds there
supportive of life, a rich diversity of life.
♪♪
Olympia oyster populations have declined.
Habitat loss, pollution,
and then we have over harvest
so that they ceased to be self-sustaining.
-It happened in the late 1800s, early 1900s.
The oyster industry here in Washington
State was really created on Olympia oysters.
That was that was the only oyster in the area.
It's the only oyster native
to the entire West Coast of North America.
Pulp mills were popping up.
Sedimentation from logging
was a big issue, smothering Olympia oyster beds.
Dense Olympia oyster populations are capable of
helping to make sure
our waters are super clean by filtering
algae out of the water.
Pacific oysters were introduced in the 1930s
and the commercial industry really shifted their attention
almost entirely away
from Olympia oysters and to Pacific oysters
because they grow faster and are easier to cultivate.
To a large extent,
people just kind of forgot about Olympia oysters.
I think it's
estimated that there's less than 4% of that dense
aggregation of Olympia oysters left in Puget Sound.
-Samish Bay is sort of one of those engines
that we're trying to kick start Olympia oyster engines,
just because it's so important for the whole region.
-What we're restoring today
is the only native oyster from Baja
all the way through southeast Alaska.
-It's a small oyster.
It's a thin-shelled oyster, but it is
an amazingly resilient oyster.
We're here not just to rebuild populations,
but also to rebuild harvest areas.
-Betsy Peabody founded
Puget Sound Restoration Fund in the late ‘90s.
Around ten years ago, we partnered with NOAA
to build this shellfish lab, the Kenneth K. Chew
Center for Shellfish Research and Restoration.
We originally built this facility
to work with Olympia oysters primarily,
but we've since expanded to include Pinto
Abalone and bull kelp. And we've worked
on a number of other species here as well.
Pinto Abalone and Olympia oysters have been food
for people here for thousands of years.
Some Olympia oysters here that are from the South
Puget Sound. Our technique for growing them is
basically trying to trick them
into thinking that it's spring,
which is their natural reproductive season.
And typically we're getting, you know,
at least a million larvae a day.
It took us
quite a long time to really figure out
how to effectively grow
Olympia oysters for restoration projects.
And we've learned quite a lot over the years,
you know, particularly this facility, the Chew Center,
has been super helpful in allowing us to figure out,
you know, the strategies that are effective.
So we also do a lot of research here
to support restoration and to learn about how climate
change and ocean acidification
are going to impact our local species and habitats.
And here's our abalone nursery.
This is where we
hold our abalone brood stock and rear our juvenile abalone.
Abalone have a special place in my heart --
pretty charismatic for being little snails.
-The foot. That’s their foot
and then right there is their mouth.
And they also have two little eyes and...
-Being snails, they're actually grazers. So they eat...
they keep the
surfaces of these rocky reef habitats clear and clean for
things like bull kelp spores to attach to and grow off of.
And there's a really tight correlation between Pinto
abalone and bull kelp forests.
[underwater bubbles]
[rolling waves]
It's been determined that without intervention,
there would be no Pinto abalone
in Washington state in the future.
We're really trying to figure out ways
to increase their populations in the San Juan Island area
in particular.
To do that, we've built out a hatchery program here
at the Chew Center and we're out planting
thousands of abalone every year to the San Juan Islands.
♪♪
Here are our Olympia oyster settlement tanks.
So this is our product basically that we create here
in the hatchery.
So if you look really closely, you can see, you know,
there's several oysters on each one of these shells
and they're pretty small there around,
you know, 2 to 3 millimeters in shell length right now.
But our goal is to get around
ten oysters per shell.
Once the oysters are big enough on here,
we'll take these shell bags
directly to the restoration sites.
[shells clanking]
-This is roughly 450 bags
of seeded cultch produced at our hatchery.
There are roughly 300 shells in each of these bags,
and there's an average of nine Olympia oysters stacked
per shell. 1.23 million Olympia oysters
that are going to be spread in Samish Bay.
Oysters need a couple of months
to harden on the shell for a while
before we break open the bags and spread the seed
come August.
We are partnering with
Taylor Shellfish Company, as well as
many different tribes
and with Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife.
We can start to create a foothold
for this oyster.
[splashing waves]
-We are at Smith Cove
Port of Seattle Tide Line property.
The Port has asked us to help them with enhancement
of the Olympia oyster.
We've brought some from the Ken Chew hatchery.
The oysters that are here are successfully breeding
now that they're adults and that the natural set
that we've observed is from this source.
This is the first time that we've seen that evidence
in the three years
that we've been down here looking for it.
-Some of our big restoration sites
that have been really successful,
we're seeing oysters
that densities of several hundred
per square meter in some spots.
-We are focused on those habitat structures
like oysters, like kelp
that help support salmon and orca.
-This is where we live.
And these are creatures that are ecosystem engineers
and super important
sentinels of the health of the Puget Sound
and have been important to humans for thousands of years
along the coast of North America.
♪♪
Watch City Stream
Tuesday nights at seven on the Seattle Channel
or find us anytime online at SeattleChannel.org.