Bringing oysters back to Bellport Bay

It’s hard to imagine the Great South Bay as a crystal-clear lagoon, but over a century ago, diverse shellfish populations helped make the bay a sanctuary for marine life, and Friends of Bellport Bay are hoping to revitalize the bay by planting shellfish.

2024 has been a pivotal year for the organization. After Brookhaven Town expanded the Bellport Bay shellfish management area from two to four acres back in February, FoBB says they expect to plant approximately one million shellfish in the zone by year’s end. The organization previously planted 4-and-1/2 million shellfish, predominantly oysters, between 2015 and 2023.

Along with planting shellfish, FoBB has hosted educational programs like a two-week marine camp and plans to construct a 3D-printed oyster reef to promote biodiversity in Bellport Bay.

“When oysters thrive, so does the entire ecosystem. When they’re absent, as they are, the entire ecosystem suffers,” said Tom Schultz, Friends of Bellport Bay co-founder. “When you plant oysters, you’re actually creating places for crabs to hide; flounder and fluke end up showing up in the colony, and then the larger fish come in.”

Oysters can also filter up to 50 gallons of water per day, removing excess algae and nitrogen from the bay. Schultz believes these bay-bottom filters are needed now as Bellport Bay remains closed off from the Atlantic following the breach closure in 2022.

“The bay almost changed overnight for the positive when the breach was open,” said Schultz. “The clarity was better, the oxygen levels were higher, the saline levels were different, and the reverse is true when the inlet closed up. The bay reverted to its pre-Sandy state, which is poor.”

To educate the community on their oyster-planting mission, FoBB organized a seminar in July, where around 150 Bellport residents learned about successful habitat restoration efforts in Maryland and New York City. Olivia Caretti, of the Oyster Recovery Partnership in Maryland, and Pete Malinowski, from the Billion Oyster Project in New York City, spoke on their experiences restoring East Coast harbors.

FoBB co-director Maria Slavnova has also hosted a two-week marine summer camp, where the organization’s interns engaged with a group from The Boys and Girls Club of Bellport and the Center for Environmental Education and Discovery.

The eager and young environmentalists planted 60,000 oysters and helped track previously planted ones, measuring data on their progress and sending them to the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation (NYSDEC). Camp-goers also constructed concrete “living seawalls” that they hung onto bulkheads to provide shelter for marine life.

Nearly nine years of oyster planting are starting to see promising results, according to Friends of Bellport Bay co-founder Katia Read.

“In the sanctuary, among our plantings of approximately 4 million oysters, we have seen new signs of marine species, some of which have not been seen in decades, including northern lined seahorses, golden star tunicates, northern pufferfish, oyster toadfish, and the American eel, among many others,” Read said.

After three years of getting permits from the NYSDEC, the Town of Brookhaven, the New York Department of State, and the Army Corps of Engineers, FoBB will lay a 16-by-6-foot reef made out of cured surf clam and covered on the bottom with oyster shells provided by Seatuck. The Cornell Cooperative Extension of Suffolk County (CCESC) also provided half a million spat-on oysters for the reef, allowing oyster larvae to grow in a relatively stable environment.

“It’s very encouraging,” Read said. “And we started off with 3,000 oysters almost 10 years ago, and we have 4 million in now. So, it’s been going well, and we’ll keep going.”