It was not easy to harvest the oysters. The oyster reefs are surrounded by mud at low tide. The shells are covered with infections. Sturdy balance and heavy gloves were essential when maneuvering around the exposed reefs.
The gray, fossilized oyster shells, rough and often stippled with barnacles, don't look like much, but collectively they preserve decades-worth of crucial data. The researchers were interested in how oyster size had changed over time. According to Durham, the size of an oyster's shell can tell you a lot about an animal's growth, lifespan, and response to changes in water quality during its lifetime.
The scientists were able to combat the phenomenon of shifting baselines by measuring the shell sizes of past generations and creating a timeline based on that data. Over time, environmental decline can change the perception of natural conditions. The size of the oysters poking above the waves today may seem normal, but once the project is complete, the researchers may find the animals are half the size of more robust ancestors.
The shells are deposited in the collection after being measured. Some 40,000 shells from Florida's oyster reefs have already made their way up to Ithaca, neatly arranged in drawers or swaddled in plastic and stored in buckets. The future of oysters in Florida is informed by the data points in each shell. Environmental managers will be able to determine which reefs have declined the most and which have the potential to be saved by adding all of the information to a database.
The Historical Oyster Body Size Project is one of many projects in the field of paleobiology where fossil data informs modern efforts. The effort to "putting the dead to work" is what a geologist at the University of Arizona who has worked with Dietl on other projects likes to call it.
The decline of the Colorado River Delta is a topic that Flessa uses clam fossils to chart. The amount of water reaching the wetlands slowed when the river was dammed. The entire islands of desiccated clam shells were left for study. His work helped restore some of the habitat that was lost in the riverbed.
Environmental managers in Florida are reaping the benefits of Dietl's work. As they re-establish reefs by laying down limestone or fossilized oyster shells, they also collect living oyster samples. The oysters are weighed, measured, and entered into a database back at the lab. The work is promising. The last time we were there, we saw more adult oysters.
This is good news given the poor state of oysters. Over the past two centuries, most of the oyster reef habitat around the world has been lost. The eastern oysters found in the Florida Panhandle are a good example of this larger trend. They are functionally extinct along the New England coast after being found from Texas to Maine. It is an all-hands-on-deck moment in the oyster world.
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