Oyster Bag event adds hundreds of thousands of oysters to the bay

The health of the Chesapeake Bay was on everyone’s mind Thursday afternoon at the annual Oyster Shell Bag at Perdue headquarters.

To date, the event has produced over 8,000 bags with about 400 shells per bag, meaning over 3.2 million oyster shells have been placed in the bay in the past eight years.

Each shell can produce ten oysters, and each individual oyster can filter 50 gallons of water in a day.

Perdue partnered with the Oyster Recovery Partnership who has been responsible for placing about a billion oysters in the bay every year.

“I’m a member of the board of the Oyster Recovery Partnership, because we think that putting a filter back in the bay, the oysters is the filter. We don’t have enough of them. And we’re putting over a billion oysters a year back into the bay,” said Perdue chairman Jim Perdue. “And that’s why the shell is so important, because this is where the baby oysters set before we put them back in the bay.”

Officials estimated they would bag about 700 bags, and at 400 shells a bag that comes out to 280,000 shells being placed into the bay from this event.