Dayton Hall, left, and Jackson Mountjoy use a caliper to measure a baby oyster at the school’s oyster garden in Bay St. Louis, Miss. The school is among more than 50 sites in Mississippi and more than 1,000 across the country where people raise oysters to help build the reef off the coast of their state.
Janet McConnaughey / AP
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Janet McConnaughey / AP
Dayton Hall, left, and Jackson Mountjoy use a caliper to measure a baby oyster at the school’s oyster garden in Bay St. Louis, Miss. The school is among more than 50 sites in Mississippi and more than 1,000 across the country where people raise oysters to help build the reef off the coast of their state.
Janet McConnaughey / AP
BAY ST. LOUIS, ma’am. – It’s time to stir oysters at St. Stanislaus on the Mississippi Gulf Coast.
Students on a platform below the school’s long pier gently shake the barn’s wire cages as they pull them out of the water, displacing the mud and algae that can trap water and nutrients from the baby oysters clinging to the shells.
These students at Bay St. Louis is part of a volunteer force along the coasts of the United States that are raising oysters from translucent spats the width of soda straws into hard-shelled bivalves that can help. restore depleted coral reefs.
Coral reefs are the foundation of coastal ecosystems. Each oyster filters 25 to 50 gallons (95 to 190 liters) of water per day. Spat glue so oysters get bigger and grow. Coral reefs provide habitat for shrimp, crabs, and fish, and protect coastlines.
In Maryland, Virginia, Mississippi and Alabama alone, there are more than 1,000 oyster farms, most of which are raised in wire cages suspended from private docks or open-ended buoys tethered to them.
Dennis Hatfield of Gulf Shores, Ala., says every summer he is attacked by the amount of crabs, fish, shrimp, sponges and other animals he empties from his cage on Little Lagoon.
“I feel very positive that we are creating habitat in the lagoon, adding that many of the 50,000 to 55,000 adult oysters raised there each year go to the reefs in the lagoon,” he said. Mobile Bay.
In the 1950s, an average of 37,400 tons of oysters were caught annually from brackish waters across the country. But overexploitation, pollution, parasites, buried sediment and other problems Federal figures show that U.S. oyster production fell 68 percent to about 11,900 tons a year during the 1990s.
Commercial farmers around the country keep oysters near the surface because they mature much faster where the water contains more plankton that they eat and predators can more easily remove.
Oyster farming uses similar techniques on a smaller scale. But oysters are not raised in a half-shell or deep fryer.
Auburn University graduates Rayne Palmer, left, and Conrad Horst with oysters collected in October to help restore Alabama’s coral reefs. Oysters are farmed at dozens of private docks along the Little Lagoon.
Dennis Hatfield / AP
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Dennis Hatfield / AP
Auburn University graduates Rayne Palmer, left, and Conrad Horst with oysters collected in October to help restore Alabama’s coral reefs. Oysters are farmed at dozens of private docks along the Little Lagoon.
Dennis Hatfield / AP
Bob Stokes, director of the Galveston Bay Foundation in Texas, says education is like restoration. The volunteers became “attached to caring about the bay they live in,” he said.
When collecting oysters in Little Lagoon, more than 20 large plastic “shrimp baskets” hold the oysters.
Large enough to breed next spring, they are currently on reefs being restored for fishing or stockpiling to house broodstock for future generations without being allowed to harvest.
In the Mississippi Sound, heavy rains that last through spring and summer have made it difficult for young oysters. Most of the shells in the cages are laid out in late June at St. Stanislaus contains only silt in mid-November, and the young that survive are usually less than an inch long.
Rayne Palmer, an Auburn University graduate student who runs the Mississippi-Alabama Sea Grant horticulture program in Mississippi, warns: “When you find one with oysters, set it aside so you don’t have an oyster. count them twice.
Students in grade 12 at St. Stanislaus HIgh Dayton Hall, left, and Jackson Mountjoy prepare to remove oyster shells from a wire cage to measure any baby oysters attached to them at the school’s oyster garden in Bay St. Louis, ma’am.
Janet McConnaughey / AP
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Janet McConnaughey / AP
Students in grade 12 at St. Stanislaus HIgh Dayton Hall, left, and Jackson Mountjoy prepare to remove oyster shells from a wire cage to measure any baby oysters attached to them at the school’s oyster garden in Bay St. Louis, ma’am.
Janet McConnaughey / AP
Letha Boudreaux, head of the marine biology program at St. Stanislaus, said hollow shells also cling to reefs.
Oyster shells are the preferred hard shell, and the entire artificial reef is made from recycled shells. The Galveston Bay program places mesh bags of recycled shells in the water to attract spats and give them a better start.
Oyster horticulture began in the late 1990s around the Chesapeake Bay, where harvests have plummeted 90% in two decades.
The Mississippi-Alabama Sea Grant’s oyster horticulture program, modeled on Chesapeake, began in Alabama in 2001 for the purpose of master’s thesis research.
“I really do,” said Kimberly Henderson Hedrick, who won the Gulf Guardian Award in 2004 as head of the Alabama Shellfish Recovery Project and now teaches in the Indiana farm town. glad to see it worked and people are still working on it. where she grew up.
Chesapeake Bay oysters have been plagued by two highly lethal parasitic diseases, among other problems. Chris Moore, senior ecosystem scientist at the Chesapeake Bay Foundation, said: “The decline in the second half of the 1900s following an even more severe crash in the 1920s caused by over-exploiting spills orchid.
Gardeners in the foundation and its member groups have added at least 15 million oysters in Maryland and 1 million in Virginia, Moore said.
Members of the Tidewater Oyster Gardeners Association of Virginia grow oysters to eat as well as to grow. Tidewater was unable to collect data on the reef’s contribution, but honorary president Vic Spain suggested it could be at least 500,000 a year.
An umbrella group called the Chesapeake Oyster Alliance has set a goal of 10 billion more oysters by 2025.
“Good luck to us, it will be difficult,” Spain wrote in an email.
In an email, spokeswoman Helene Hetrick said dozens of schools and community groups around New York Harbor have similar projects as part of the Billion Oyster Project. The project does not call them “oyster gardens” because the oysters in the port are not safe to eat and the goal is not food but recovery, she said.
Oyster gardens are pulled out of the water weekly for up to 10 days to remove impurities, keep oysters from growing through cage nets, and dry and clean up algae and algae growth on the lines.
Oysters can take three to four years to mature in the Chesapeake and one year to 18 months in cages.
PJ Waters, Auburn University extension associate professor who oversees Alabama’s oyster farming at the Mississippi-Alabama Sea Grant, said in Mobile Bay and Mississippi, it can take as long as four to five months to have oysters ready for transplant. .
Colin Wood, one of two interns who maintain the St. Stanislaus, who collects data and supervises other students — not for pay but for inclusion on their transcripts — says he’s excited about the hands-on aspect.
“I didn’t realize oysters had such a big impact on the environment,” he said.
