The school's oyster garden in Bay St. Louis, Miss., has a baby oyster measuring device. More than 50 locations in Mississippi and more than 1,000 nationwide are where people raise oysters to help build reefs.
Janet McConnaughey.
Bay St. is located in Bay St. It's time to stir the oysters at the school.
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, freeing mud and algae that might keep water and nutrients from baby oysters clinging to those shells.
Students in Bay St. Louis are part of a volunteer force that raises oysters from translucent spat the width of a soda straw to hard-shelled bivalves that can help restore the reefs.
Oyster reefs are important to the coastal environment. Each oyster filters up to 50 gallons of water a day. Spat themselves to larger oysters to grow. Shrimp, crabs, and fish can be found on the reefs.
In Maryland, Virginia, Mississippi and Alabama alone, there are more than 1,000 oyster gardens, most of which are in wire cages hanging from private docks or open-topped floats.
Dennis Hatfield of Gulf Shores, Alabama, said he is struck by the number of crabs, fish, shrimp, sponges and other animals he clears from his cages on Little Lagoon each summer.
He said that many of the 50,000 to 55,000 adult oysters grown there each year go to reefs in Mobile Bay.
In the 1950s, an average of 37,400 tons of oysters were taken annually from the country's brackish waters. In the 1990s, oyster harvests in the U.S. fell by over 70% due to pollution, parasites, and other problems.
Commercial farmers around the country grow oysters near the surface because they mature faster there and the water holds more plankton they eat.
Oyster gardening is done on a smaller scale. The oysters are not being grown for deep fryers.
In October, two graduate students from the University of auburn collected oysters to help restore Alabama's reefs. Private docks along Little Lagoon were where the oysters were grown.
Dennis Hatfield.
The director of the Galveston Bay Foundation in Texas said it's as much education as restoration. He said that volunteers become more interested in caring for the bay they live on.
More than 20 big plastic "shrimp baskets" held oysters when they were collected.
They're big enough to make a brood stock and are being restored for fishing or reserved for future generations with no harvest allowed.
Heavy rains in the Mississippi Sound made it hard for baby oysters. Most of the shells in the cages were less than an inch long, and most of the juvenile were less than an inch long.
"If you find one with an oyster, put it aside so you don't count them twice," said Palmer, who runs the Mississippi-Alabama Sea Grant's gardening program in Mississippi.
Jackson Mountjoy and Dayton Hall are going to remove oyster shells from a wire cage to measure baby oysters at the school's oyster garden in Bay St. Louis, Miss.
Janet McConnaughey.
Letha Boudreaux is the head of the marine biology program at St. Stanislaus.
Artificial reefs are made from recycled shells. The mesh bags put into the water by the Galveston Bay program will attract spat and give them a head start.
The harvests of oysters plummeted in the late 1990s around the bay.
The Mississippi-Alabama Sea Grant's oyster gardening program started in Alabama in 2001 as a master's thesis.
"It makes me really happy to see that people are still doing it, even though it took off in Alabama," said Hedrick, who won a Gulf Guardian Award in 2004 as head of Alabama's Shellfish Restoration Project.
The oysters in the bay were beset by diseases and other problems. The second half of the 1900s saw a decline from rampant overharvesting and the crash in the 1920s.
Moore said that the foundation and its member groups have added at least 15 million oysters.
The members of the Virginia's Tidewater Oyster Gardeners Association grow oysters to eat. It's not possible for Tidewater to collect data on reef contributions, but president emeritus Vic Spain thinks it's at least 500,000 a year.
A group called the Chesapeake Oyster Alliance wants to add 10 billion oysters by the year 2025.
Spain wrote in an email that it would be difficult.
Dozens of schools and community groups around New York Harbor have similar projects as part of the Billion Oyster Project. She said that the project doesn't call them Oyster Gardens because the harbor's oysters are unsafe to eat and the goal is not food but restoration.
Oyster gardens get pulled from the water every week to 10 days to clear out the creatures, keep the oysters from growing through the cage mesh, and dry out the seaweed growing on the wire.
Oysters can take three to four years to reach adulthood in the Chesapeake, and 18 months in raised cages.
P.J. Waters, an associate professor at Alabama's Sea Grant, said that it can take up to five months to transplant oysters in Mobile Bay.
Colin Wood, one of two student interns who maintain the St. Stanislaus garden, said he was excited by the hands-on aspect of his internship.
He said he didn't know oysters had a big impact on the environment.
