Spreading Oysters, Peer to Pier

A half-dozen men in lifejackets and wetsuits bobbed in the water off the end of a defunct pier near Kent Island on a hot August day as a small motorboat floated nearby.

It wasn’t an impromptu swimming party or a rescue mission—just the latest venture in a Terp’s growing grassroots mission to help restore a keystone of the Chesapeake Bay. The Peer to Pier Network, led by John Consoli ’86, a University of Maryland photographer, has brought scores of people into an activity known as citizen oyster gardening. The group aims to give Marylanders who live on or near the bay the know-how to raise their own oysters, just as backyard gardeners might raise prize potatoes or petunias.

“Whether you're putting 100, 1,000 or a million oysters back into the bay, you are taking the step to do good,” Consoli said. “And even one is better than none.” 

His aim is higher than just sharing a fun hobby. Oysters are one of the bay’s keystone species, filtering pollutants and sediment from the water as they feed—a single large adult might clean up to 50 gallons a day. But because of overharvesting, disease and habitat loss, the current population is a shadow of the many billions that thrived when Europeans reached North America. Then, oyster reefs protruded above the water in many spots, while today it can sometimes be a challenge to spot any at all.

The consequences include the steady decline of historic fishing communities that depended on the bay, as well as the proliferation of algal blooms, dead zones and ecosystem harm for other bay species. 

The group today was expanding to include its first business member: Libbey’s Coastal Kitchen + Cocktails, which overlooks the Chesapeake Bay Bridge. Its pier, destroyed by a storm, had been converted on the shore end into a deck for guests. The other end, where 16 pilings peeked out of the water, would soon become homes for up to 1 million baby oysters.

“We’re ready for the next one!” Consoli shouted to the boaters, who began lowering a heavy concrete mass down into the water. Each of these “piling cuffs” was seeded with countless oyster larvae. 

Restaurant co-owner Walt Petrie, who watched from the deck, had been inspired to join the effort after seeing an article in Kent Island Neighbors magazine about Consoli’s project.

Getting involved, which cost several thousand for the equipment and the procedure to embed the oyster larvae, struck Petrie and business partner Tim McGrath as a good investment. Although state regulations forbid them from selling any oyster they grow on their property, without healthy Chesapeake Bay and marine ecosystems, there’d be no seafood restaurants, Petrie said. 

“A lot of our guests come out here to the pier, and this will help them see that oysters aren’t just good eating,” he said. “They actually do a lot of good.”

Although Consoli had never been the biggest fan of oysters at the table, he became fascinated by the beneficial attributes of water-filtering bivalves while shooting photos for a feature article in UMD’s Terp magazine in 2022. 

“Meeting the younger watermen opened up my eyes to everything we talk about at UMD: sustainability, doing good, serving the state,” Consoli said. “The way they harvest, sell, buy back the shells, reseed empty shells with oyster larvae and then plant and regrow them is the most sustainable circle I’ve ever seen—you’re improving the environment and feeding people at the same time.”

That summer, he bought some oyster shells that had been seeded with baby oysters from the Horn Point Oyster Hatchery, part of the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science. After seeking guidance from the University of Maryland Extension and elsewhere, he began floating the oysters in bags suspended 8 to 10 inches below the surface in homemade floats. There, at the most nutrient-rich depth, they can reach maturity in 18 months, rather than the three years it takes when oysters sit on the bottom.

[The Modern Battle for Maryland’s Oysters]

Extension Principal Agent Don Webster, who is part of the Oyster Aquaculture Education and Training Program team, recalled conducting a program for the county Master Gardener Program for them to learn about oyster gardening at Consoli’s bayfront house.

“John began by raising oysters at his place. His neighbors were all wondering what’s going on. He was glad to teach them and pretty soon he had 20 of them doing it too, and then 40 of them,” Webster chuckled. 

By this summer, the irrepressible Consoli had helped about 80 people in his neighborhood and beyond to begin raising their own oysters. The group now tends 100,000 oysters, filtering an estimated 1 billion gallons of water yearly. Like him, those who love the bay are willing to put in time, effort and even money to safeguard it for future generations and for the creatures that make it home, he said.

Consoli’s pitch is tuned to whatever potential novice oyster growers feel capable of taking on. One of his elderly neighbors buys live, full-grown oysters and places them in the bay, while others are determined to grow them from “spat”—fertilized larvae. Some salivate thinking about grilled, baked or raw oysters, while others are doing it to restore oyster populations and have no more desire to eat what they grow than rose gardeners do.

A recent focus is the piling cuffs that he and volunteers installed at Libbey’s. Developed by University of North Carolina Chapel Hill Professor of marine sciences Niels Lindquist and marketed through his Sandbar Oyster Co., the cuffs are strapped or bolted to pier pilings and give oysters a place to attach and live. (The toxic chemicals used in pilings to fight shipworms and other boring animals also stop oysters from attaching on their own, Lindquist said.)

Why focus on growing oysters on pilings at all? For one, it keeps the creatures out of the mud, which can smother them, and away from other animals like crabs that would love to eat them when small. 

Plus, Consoli said, look at all the piers—many of them unused with the decline of Chesapeake fisheries—that line mile after mile of shore. He’s currently talking to marinas, yacht clubs and restaurants about using their pilings to expand the project, and envisions a day when wrapping a piling in oyster-friendly material could become standard practice. (For active piers, he adds, only the inside of a piling would grow oysters to avoid damaging boats, while unused pilings like those at Libbey’s can be fully encircled.)

“I think there’s no reason these aren’t everywhere one day,” Consoli said, “and when that happens, it can transform the fate of oysters in the bay.”

At Libbey’s, one of Consoli’s neighbors showed up fully swathed in a long-sleeve swimming shirt and tights—”my leotard,” joked Robert Stershic— to hold off the jellyfish swarming in the water that day while he helped attach the piling cuffs. 

“I think like any native Marylander, and particularly someone who lives on the water, the health of the bay has always been something I’m aware of, and something you might like to do something to help,” Stershic said. “And when I met John, I thought, here’s something I can do.”

And how will he celebrate a cleaner bay environment? “I do intend to eat oysters,” he said.