But harvesting oysters is not easy. At low tide, the oyster reefs are surrounded by viscous mud, sometimes thigh-high. The shell itself is razor sharp and covered with bacteria that cause infection. This makes heavy gloves and solid balance essential when moving around exposed reefs.
Fossil oyster shells, which are grey, rough and often thorny, don’t look like much, but all in all, they hold decades’ worth of important data. The researchers were particularly interested in how oyster size changed during fishing. According to Durham, the size of an oyster’s shell can tell you how quickly it grows, how long it lives, and how it responds to changes in water quality throughout its lifespan.
Measuring the shell sizes of previous generations and creating a timeline based on that data also helps scientists combat baseline shifts — what Dietl calls “generational amnesia.” Because environmental degradation occurs over time, it can alter perceptions of natural conditions. For example, the size of oysters jutting out of the waves might seem normal today, but when the project was completed, researchers were able to spot oysters half the size of their ancestors. healthier.
After they are measured, the shells are deposited in the collection of the Institute of Paleontology. About 40,000 shells harvested from oyster reefs in Florida have been brought to Ithaca, neatly arranged in drawers or wrapped in plastic and stored in buckets. Each shell preserves a key data point that informs the future of oysters in Florida. All the information added to the database will help environmental managers determine which reefs are losing the most — and which are likely to be saved.
Dietl’s Historical Oyster Body Size project is just one of a number of projects in the growing field of conservation paleontology, where fossil data inform modern conservation efforts. Karl Flessa, a geologist at the University of Arizona who has worked with Dietl on other projects, likens the effort to “putting the dead to work.”
In her own work, Flessa uses clam fossils to chart the decline of the Colorado River Delta. When the river was dammed in the 1930s, the amount of water reaching the delta’s wetlands was reduced to a trickle. This leaves the entire archipelago of desiccated shells for Flessa to study. More recently, his work has helped restore riparian pockets to arid river beds.
Environmental regulators in Florida have reaped many benefits from Dietl’s work. As they re-established reefs by placing limestone or fossilized oyster shells to provide a firm surface for the oysters to cling to, Brucker’s team also collected live oyster samples. Back in the lab, these oysters were measured, weighed and entered into a database, like their fossil relatives in Ithaca. The work, while still early, is promising. “We saw more mature oysters than the last time we were there, over a year ago,” says Brucker.
This is especially encouraging given the bleak global oyster situation. Some estimate that 85% of the habitat of oyster reefs around the world has been lost in the past two centuries. The eastern oysters found along the Florida Panhandle are a microcosm of this larger trend. After finding the word Texas arrive Maine, they became functionally extinct along large swaths of the New England coast. “It was an all-in-one moment in the oyster world,” says Durham.
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