GLOUCESTER POINT, Va. — Volunteers work amid whiffs of cocktail sauce and Tabasco, cleaning shells collected from shucking houses and restaurants that may end up one day on a holiday table with plump, new oysters glistening in their center.
The shell recycling by these retirees and new college graduates is a labor of love. They painstakingly clean each shell so it can be matched to a baby oyster larvae and returned to the Chesapeake Bay and tributaries, helping to replenish a bivalve population battered by decades of disease, pollution and overharvesting.
Today, the Chesapeake Bay oyster numbers only about 1 or 2 percent of its historic highs.
More and more, however, thousands of residents and small-scale operations around the environmentally crippled estuary are pitching in on the task of gathering shells for new reefs, oyster farming on leased tributaries and dropping grow cages off docks for "oyster gardens."
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