Study Puts Some Mussels into Bay Restoration

New Research by Virginia Institute of Marine ScienceShowsthat the Mussels that Typically Colonize the Nooks and Crannies of a Restored Oyster Reef can More Than Double its Overall Filtration Capacity

Restoring oysters—and their ability to filter large volumes of water—is widely seen as a key way to improve the health of Chesapeake Bay.

The study—by researchers at the University of Maryland, the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center, and the Virginia Institute of Marine Science—appears as the cover story in themost recent issue of Restoration Ecology .

"Many efforts to restore coastal habitat focus on planting just one species, such as oysters, mangroves, or seagrass," says UMD'sKeryn Gedan, the study's lead author. "However, our research shows that the positive effects of diverse ecosystems can be much greater. In the case of oyster reefs, commonly associated species such as mussels may multiply the water quality benefits of restoration by filtering more and different portions of the plankton."

"Estimates of the ecosystem services provided by a restoration project are used to justify, prioritize, and evaluate such projects," addsVIMS scientist Lisa Kellogg. "By quantifying the significant role that mussels can play in filtration within an oyster-reef habitat, our work shows that the ‘return on investment' for oyster-reef restoration is potentially much higher than commonly thought."

Filtering plankton helps improve water quality because these tiny drifting organisms thrive on the excess nitrogen and other nutrients that humans release into the Bay and its tributaries through farming, wastewater outflow, and the burning of fossil fuels.

The research team, which also included SERC'sDenise Breitburg, based their findings on a combination of laboratory experiments and computer modeling. In the lab, they added phytoplankton of different size classes to tanks containing eastern oysters ( Crassostrea virginica ) or hooked mussels ( Ischadium recurvum ), then measured the animals' filtration rates at different temperatures. They then incorporated these measured rates into a simple model and used that to simulate overall filtration for three different restoration scenarios inHarris Creek, Maryland, one of the East Coast's largest oyster-reef restoration sites.

Source: Virginia Institute of Marine Science

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