Filtering 3.5 Million Gallons of Seawater Every Day
We’ve been stirring on this idea of Quantifiable Impact all year. In an effort to differentiate how we think about helping our communities, we sat down with our charitable partners and put a number on how many oysters we have helped to reseed and what they can do for our local inshore waterways.
“A single adult oyster can filter more than 50 gallons of water a day.”
Over the course of this spring and summer season, we’ve seen an unusual amount of storm surge and other factors contributing to continuous sewage outflows and runoff with bays, harbors, and rivers in which we live. In Lowell, MA we saw 84 million gallons pour into the Merrimack River. In Tampa, FL an outflow sent 250 million gallons of raw sewage into the water where harmful Red Tide and other algae blooms are taking over bays, feeding on an abundance of nutrients and choking out all fish and other marine life in droves. Most recently, 17 million gallons flowed out into California’s Santa Monica Bay rendering beaches unsafe for days.
These events make our mission to support naturally regulating filter feeders and marine life that much more important. Without a balanced ecosystem, these events and life as we know it on the water will change forever.
At the Long Wharf, we’re committed to contributing as well as rolling up our sleeves and getting our hands dirty. We recently documented our collection of over 525 lbs of shell on Cape Cod which will be used as artificial reefs for oyster growth next year. Last year, proceeds from every item in our SeaWell™ Collection went directly to funding not only shell recycling, but direct reseeding programs. We’ve determined for every $1 donated, our partner organizations like the Massachusetts Oyster Project and the South Fork Sea Farmers, can seed at least 20 oysters. To date, we’ve been able to help reseed 70,000 oysters which naturally filter 3.5 million gallons of seawater in our local waterways every day.
The oyster’s ability to remain resilient and versatile makes them so impactful and such a good candidate to help naturally regulate waterways. Because of this, they can be found in most climates on Earth from the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of Maine and across the seas to Europe and Asia. We hope programs like these can be scaled and replicated nationally and globally in time, but it starts here one oyster at a time.
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