STUDYING OYSTERS AND LIVING SHORELINES TO HELP PREVENT EROSION

Kayla McVey ’24, a Calvert County, Maryland native, was a summer intern at Patuxent Environmental & Aquatic Research Laboratory (PEARL). She studied whether oysters can be used in living shorelines to help prevent shoreline erosion in environments such as the Chesapeake Bay area.

Kayla, an Environmental Science major, worked with faculty from Morgan State University to study oysters and shoreline erosion. She focused on the ways oysters can be used in low-salinity environments to prevent shoreline erosion.

“Living shorelines work pretty well in the Chesapeake Bay. Oyster beds in the living shoreline usually only work in high-salinity environments such as the Chesapeake Bay since it gets water from the ocean,” she says.

“But a body of water that has a lower salinity (as of now) can’t really support an oyster bed because it’s just not the optimal environment. We tried to see if there’s a low-salinity-tolerant oyster line that we can use in a living shoreline.”

The research wasn’t without its challenges.

“Unfortunately, the data that we collected didn’t show any significant difference between the low-salinity tolerant line of oysters and the native ones,” Kayla explained. “This was likely due to water contamination since the microorganisms that contaminated our water will outcompete the oyster larvae for food and space.”

Despite the challenges, Kayla was well-prepared for her internship and credits her YCP education with helping her conduct this research. She says

Ecology classes contributed to her understanding about how the oysterbreeding process works.

Kayla wants to go into environmental policy and believes her education in Environmental Science is preparing her for a career in policy later down the road.