Oyster gardening started in the late 1990s around the Chesapeake Bay, where harvests had plummeted 90% in two decades. The Galveston Bay program puts mesh bags holding recycled shells into the water to attract spat and give them a head start. Oyster shells are the hard surface spat prefer, and entire artificial reefs are made from recycled shells. "When you find one with an oyster, put it aside so you don't count them twice," cautioned Rayne Palmer, an Auburn University graduate student who runs the Mississippi-Alabama Sea Grant's gardening program in Mississippi.Įmpty shells also go onto reefs, said Letha Boudreaux, head of the marine biology program at St. Stanislaus held only silt in mid-November, and surviving juveniles were generally less than an inch long. Most shells in the cages set out in late June at St. In the Mississippi Sound, heavy rains through spring and summer were hard on baby oysters. When the Little Lagoon oysters were collected, more than 20 big plastic "shrimp baskets" held clumps of oysters.īig enough to spawn next spring, they're now on reefs being restored for fishing or reserved to hold brood stock for future generations, with no harvest allowed. Volunteers become "engaged about caring about the bay they live on," he said. It's as much education as restoration, said Bob Stokes, director of the Galveston Bay Foundation in Texas. But the oysters aren't being grown for the half-shell or deep fryer. Oyster gardening uses the same techniques on a smaller scale. oyster harvests fall 68% to about 11,900 tons a year in the 1990s, federal figures show.Ĭommercial farmers around the country grow oysters near the surface because they mature much faster where the water holds more of the plankton they eat and predators can be more easily removed. But overharvesting, pollution, parasites, smothering sediment and other problems saw U.S. In the 1950s, an average of 37,400 tons of oysters were taken annually from brackish waters nationwide. "I feel very positive we are creating habitat in the lagoon," he said, adding that many of the 50,000 to 55,000 adult oysters grown there each year go to reefs in Mobile Bay. In Maryland, Virginia, Mississippi and Alabama alone, there are more than 1,000 oyster gardens, most in wire cages hanging from private docks or open-topped floats tied to them.ĭennis Hatfield of Gulf Shores, Alabama, said he is struck each summer by the number of crabs, fish, shrimp, sponges and other animals he clears from his cages on Little Lagoon.
The reefs provide habitat for shrimp, crabs and fish and protect shorelines. Spat glue themselves to larger oysters and grow. Each oyster filters 25 to 50 gallons (95 to 190 liters) of water a day.
Oyster reefs are a keystone of coastal ecosystems. coasts that's raising oysters from translucent spat the width of a soda straw to hard-shelled bivalves that can help restore depleted reefs. Louis are part of a volunteer force along U.S.
Students on a platform below the school's long pier gently shake their oyster garden's wire cages as they pull them from the water, loosening mud and algae that might keep water and nutrients from baby oysters clinging to those shells.
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