DATE: Sunday, October 26, 1997              TAG: 9710260057

SECTION: LOCAL                   PAGE: B3   EDITION: FINAL 

SOURCE: BY PHYLLIS SPEIDELL, STAFF WRITER 
DATELINE: SUFFOLK                           LENGTH:   85 lines

OYSTER PROJECT OFFERS LESSONS FOR STUDENTS

The very thought of an oyster sends a shudder through Tiniqua Burgess, a seventh-grader at Portsmouth's W.E. Waters Middle School in Portsmouth.

Fried, steamed, stewed. It doesn't matter. Oysters may be delicacies to some people, but Tiniqua wants nothing to do with the slippery flesh of the mollusks.

So why is she eagerly spending after-school hours on the shore of Chuckatuck Creek, watching over 2,000 baby oysters?

Even though she doesn't find them appetizing, Tiniqua said, she does find them fascinating.

She and her classmates are tending hatchery-produced seed oysters, each about a half-inch long, in a project combining science, math, history and language arts.

``While we are learning about oysters, we are helping to restock the Bay,'' she said. ``This is physical learning, where you get experience instead of just learning from books.''

By the end of the school year, the well oysters should have grown to about 2 inches, and the students will have learned:

Oystering was the most valuable commercial fishery in the Chesapeake Bay until the mid-1980s, when it was surpassed by crabbing.

Disease, overharvesting, pollution and loss of habitat have depleted the bay's oyster count to about 1 percent of its level 100 years ago.

The Chesapeake Bay Foundation, through restoration projects like the one Tiniqua and her friends are doing, hopes - over the next 10 years - to increase the count to 8 percent of its historic high.

Functioning much like filters in a giant fish tank, oysters filter the Bay water. The large number of oysters 100 years ago were once able to filter the entire body of water in three to six days. The decreased population now requires almost a year.

The oysters under the watchful eyes of Tiniqua and her friends are destined for the recently constructed intertidal sanctuary reef in the Lynnhaven River. It is part of a Chesapeake Bay program to restore 5,000 acres of oyster reefs in Virginia and Maryland.

Last spring, a number of Hampton Roads middle school and high school students attended a workshop sponsored by the Chesapeake Bay Foundation and the Virginia Marine Resource to learn about oyster aquaculture and assembling Taylor floats.

The 8-foot-by-2-foot racks, constructed of PVC pipe and wire mesh, are the oysters' growing bed.

Early in October, Tiniqua's class, led by Waters science teacher Cathy Roberts, moored the float at Thomas Hazlewood's pier in Crittenden. Although Hazlewood, now commissioner of revenue in Suffolk, no longer works on the water, he is a fifth-generation waterman who also has experimented with oyster aquaculture.

Crittenden and Eclipse, small communities nestled between the Chuckatuck Creek and the Nansemond River, once were active watermen communities where work boats jammed the creek. In more recent years, however, the oyster supply has so declined that local men can no longer earn their living from the water, and only a few boats venture out to fish or crab.

For Roberts' class, mostly city children who know about crabs, clams and oysters largely from menus, Crittenden is a different world.

``The choice of this site is important because it is still a working watermen site, and we hope that the kids will get to see some of the water industry, crabbers and clammers, as we come out here at different times to check on the oysters,'' Roberts said.

At least once a month, students head to the pier to check on water quality, clean the float and check for predator damage, monitor the oysters' growth and condition and record their observations.

``The kids will be doing real-world science research because the data is actually being used to determine if these projects can make a difference in the oyster population of the Chesapeake Bay,'' Roberts said.

Laurie Sorabella, Virginia restoration coordinator for the Chesapeake Bay Foundation, worked with Roberts' class when the oysters were first planted.

``The greatest thing about this program is that this is not just a token project,'' Sorabella said. ``They are making a serious contribution to the Bay.''

The Foundation has assisted 30 schools and 40 individuals and civic groups in constructing and planting oyster gardens in Hampton Roads. A local Rotary club and a Girl Scout troop, working with a resource class of third-, fourth-, and fifth-graders from Western Branch Intermediate School in Chesapeake, also have moored oyster gardens in the Crittenden waters. ILLUSTRATION: JIM WALKER photos

At a Chesapeake Bay Foundation-sponsored workshop in August,

volunteers Paul Krop and his daughter Nicole construct oyster floats

from PVC pipes and wire mesh. The racks are used as growing beds

for seed oysters in local creeks and rivers.

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