News-Letter

The Chesapeake Bay is both a crucial part of Maryland's economy and an incredibly fragile ecosystem. New research from Hopkins suggests that efforts to revitalize oyster harvesting in the Bay could have unintended consequences for both the economy and the ecosystem.

At their peak in the late 19th century, the oyster beds in Chesapeake Bay yielded 15 million bushels, or 154 million pounds of oysters each year, accounting for up to half of the nation's harvest.

The oysters collectively filtered enough water to fill the entire Chesapeake Bay - about 19 trillion gallons - once a week.

The main species in the bay is Crassostrea virginica, known alternatively as the Eastern or American oyster. A combination of overharvesting, habitat degradation and parasitic disease has devastated the Chesapeake oyster population.

Today's oyster population has been decimated: It is at just one percent of the peak levels of a century ago, and harvests have likewise declined. For several years, officials have been looking for a way to reinvigorate the oyster populations in the Bay. One long-debated plan has been to bring an Asian species of oyster to the Bay - specifically, Crassostrea ariakensis, or the Suminoe oyster - in the hopes that it will fare better than its western relative.

Many scientists are curious about the impact the new species would have on the Chesapeake Bay ecology, but a group of scientists at the Bloomberg School of Public Health were the first to study how C. ariakensis might change human interactions with the Bay.

A research team led by Kellogg Schwab discovered that C. ariakensis is significantly more likely than C. virginica to harbor viruses that can cause gastroenteritis in people who eat raw shellfish. Their findings appear in the September issue of the journal Applied Environmental Microbiology.

The team studied the two oyster species and five different viruses over a month, alternating days when the oysters were exposed to the viruses and days when the oysters were kept in clean water, giving them a chance to flush out the accumulated viruses from their tissues.

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