The Effort To Restore an Historic Oyster Reef

This June, WGCU is premiering a documentary about Kimberley's Reef. Florida Gulf Coast University's unique artificial reef that's dedicated to hands on classroom and global reaching research. And joining me now in the studio is the executive producer of content for WGCU and one of our producers of the upcoming documentary, Miss Pam James. Welcome. So good to be here. This it's wonderful to have you here. And I'm going to get to nerd out. That's going to be great. Well, you attended this wonderful conference. It was a Southwest Florida artificial reef conference. And why was it important for you to go and what did you learn? Well, as part of the Kimberly's Reef project, we wanted to go and kind of re record what research that the team here at Fgcu have been working on. But while we were there, it was a full day conference. So we figured, we really needed to kind of capture a lot of the information that they were kind of sharing from the six counties, along all of, southwest Florida Gulf Coast. Then the fact is, is that fishing is such a huge, deal here in Florida. I mean, it is a $13.8 billion industry. That's for recreational fishing. And so having an artificial reef like this every two years or so is why this is so important. It was hosted by sea Grant and, Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission. I was astounded that you said almost $14 billion in the state of Florida, basically from salt and freshwater recreational fishing. What role do artificial reefs play in this? A huge role. I mean, the fact is, is that one of the dodges that they used to say was, if you build it, it will come. And that's exactly what happens when you put in an artificial reef. Fish are attracted to, anything that's going to a structure on the bottom of the ocean, whether it's a natural reef or an artificial reef. And so if you bring in the fish, you bring in the the anglers, you bring in the divers, and then you bring in their dollars. So that's why it's such an important program that the, sea Grant and Florida Fish and Wildlife hosts this workshop every two years or so. Can you talk a little bit about the widespread economic impact of this, for Southwest Florida? Actually, I can't other than the fact that, the last research that they did was back in 2009, and a lot has happened since then. The, the research that they did did in 2009 included Pinellas County and six counties down. And it did not include Collier County, which has in 2015 dumped a couple of artificial reefs. So, what they're saying is that, back in 2009, the dollars equated to about $253 million just in those six counties. And so if you were to try to equate that to today's math, it's about $490 million. So they're due for a new research, survey, about the economic impact for Southwest Florida. What are some of the other things that they addressed or discussed in addition to the economic impact? Oh, there was a lot of science flying around. So each county presented, you know, the different kind of artificial reefs that they're placing into their waters. You know, some are doing it purely to capture a specific kind of, sport fish like redfish is a huge, huge deal. And so, FWC presented, a snapper count where they were actually trying to count, snappers and seeing where they travel to and from and whether the, like, artificial reefs or natural reefs. And, so it was just a lot of, like I said, a lot of science. And so what I would recommend that if people really want to get the the low down information about the science is to go to, FWC to their website to see Grant, to see all the different, experiments that are going on. And then also, if you're in a particular county, go visit those counties to see what the artificial reefs are doing in their region. People aren't doing it because they're going to get rich. People are doing this and doing these workshops because they're passionate about their jobs. They're passionate about fish, and they're passionate about a healthy environment. And that's why one presentation caught our attention that I'd like to share with you. It wasn't exactly about attracting fish, but restoring an old oyster reef in the Manatee River. I'll talk about how we screwed Manatee River up pretty successfully, and that kind of holds true for most things in this area relative to oysters specifically. Talk about how, this little nonprofit that I started about three years ago is taking this stuff on because I thought everybody else was kind of doing it wrong and not doing it enough. So I'll make some friends today, and talk about how we're addressing the incredibly high cost of oyster restoration. Native Floridian Damon Moore is unabashedly unapologetic when it comes to oyster restoration in the Manatee River. This is why we do it. It doesn't filter 50 gallons of water per oyster per day. Everybody, please stop saying that. It's more like 3 or 12. Moore's passion was further enhanced when he learned the Manatee River was once so full of oysters, it was impassable, and it was actually called oyster River. He discovered this through a letter between two Spaniards proposing a fort on the river. This was when Florida was bouncing between Spanish control and British control. This was kind of the letter back transport translated back into English, that once you go further up the bay that you find by the Indians called Tyler chop through and by the Spaniards river oysters, on account of the many which block its entrance. If you want to go out and see if it's blocked by oysters, you'll see that it's not. But that was a really interesting thing all the way back from 1793 that they're we're calling it the oyster River and saying there's so many dang on oysters in this thing, you can't even get in and out of it. Other documents also labeled the waterway oyster River, describing its output as of rivaling another well known oyster region. But they talked about in 1876, this is right when there was still oysters. Oysters everywhere. The weekly line of steamers to manatee with oyster and fish trade. And most people don't think of the Manatee River as an Apalachicola like thing, where we were shipping out oysters or anything like that. But again, 1878 1887, heavy shipment of oysters out of Parma sold out as people moved to the region. Oysters were pulled from the river for more than a food source. There's been a lot of a lot of stressors on oysters historically. First, you know, people, people eating them. It's a free source of food out there. But as our communities grew, people needed like sources for road building materials. Started local roads, but eventually commercial scale, dredging that happened over a period of about 30 years, which is like 650,000yd³ of shell more. Describe the impact. That's a hard number to visualize because like the back of a pickup truck is like a yard of shell. That's enough shell to load dump trucks from here to Orlando and back. Bumper to bumper full of shell. And that really matters because those oysters need that hard material to reattach and have future generations of growth. So between that removal of that culture, all that hard material, we call that culture and the changes in hydrology to the river. It was really a it's a really bad scene for oysters. So more decided to do his part to replace the oysters through his nonprofit, oyster River ecology. So historically, these large reefs would have really been in between, like downtown Palmetto and downtown Bradenton. There was a document about 67 acre reef right there in between those two, with changes in hydrology of that river by dredging at the mouth and then putting a dam the front, that sweet spot, kind of the Goldilocks zone for salinity has moved upstream. And that's where we're targeting our work. Our reef, is ten acres permitted there. And it's just to the east, I-75, right where the river really starts to break up into a bunch of smaller channels. So it's big, open and wide there. Really cool too. Is we have like our neighbors to our restoration site is a retirement community, Colony Cove. They've embraced it. And they were at our warehouse yesterday creating these oyster rag pots. The oyster rag pots are Moore's idea for a cost efficient mechanism to attract oysters. Project coordinator Abby Kuhn describes this process. It's a cotton rag, wooden kind of craft spacer. And then a landscaping pin. So all we do is we coat the rag in cement and then put the spacer in to kind of hold it open and give it more surface area. And then the landscaping goes in and we hang it upside down to dry. It takes about 24 to 48 hours to cure. So far we've created an installed about 30,000. With that ten acre site. We put them on one foot centers. It'll be about almost about half a million that will install. So in about 10 to 12 months, we'll see them start to coalesce together. And multi-generational oysters on top of the original set. There are organizations working to rebuild oysters in other areas. We all know from all those awesome studies the shells are the best things for oysters to attach to. The problem is, the biggest oyster recycler around this area by far is Tampa Bay watch. They've recycled since their program. It's a little bit more than this now. It's about 300,000, but this is the pounds of shell that they recycle, which sounds like a lot of pounds of shell. But if you understand how many pounds of shell it takes to restore one square foot of reef, then you can do some math to figure out how far that's going to go. So it takes about a cubic foot of shell to make a square foot of reef. A cubic foot of shell weighs about 50 pounds. So if you take that 281,317 pounds of shell and you divide that by 50, you get 5626ft² of. And if you're not really like spatially accurate, that still sounds like a lot of square feet to reef. But then you think of like, what's the yard of my Marla Point two acres and that that four years of collecting shells and all that's very resource intensive will get you 0.13 acres of shell. So it's great. It feels good to eat those oysters and know that you're saving the oysters, but it's not scalable. Moore is proud that each of his rack pots only costs about a dollar. And just the beautiful thing is, like, it's kind of a craft project. Like, the people make these things to put little flower pots in. We take advantage of that. We have volunteer groups that make these things with us in our warehouse. Like two weekends ago, we had a volunteer group do an installation where we brought out 4500 of them, and a group of about ten of us got all those done in about three hours. So it's it's working well, and that's, that's why we're doing it. That's why we're here sharing this information with other people in hopes that more people will kind of embrace this kind of low tech, but very effective approach. For WGCU I'm Pam James with vide