O Oysters, said the Carpenter,
You’ve had a pleasant run!
Shall we be trotting home again?
But answer came there none—
And this was scarcely odd, because
They’d eaten every one.
From The Walrus and the Carpenter, by Lewis Carroll
Long before the 2020 moratorium on oyster harvesting in Florida’s Apalachicola Bay, the resource was in decline. Years of intense harvesting, drought, and increasing salinity in the bay caused the fishery to crash in 2012. As the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission (FWC) prepares to reopen the fishery, it hopes to avoid past mistakes.
Once the source of 90 percent of the oysters harvested in Florida, Apalachicola Bay is fed by the Chatahoochee and Flint Rivers, both of which flow through Georgia and combine in Florida to form the Apalachicola River. But the oysters suffered from a series of events listed notably in a Supreme Court decision that came after Florida tried to sue Georgia in 2013 for reducing the amount of fresh water that reached the bay.
The Supreme Court ruled that Florida’s harvesting regulations, years of drought, and U.S. Army Corps of Engineers decisions on how much water to release from dams on both the Chattahoochee and Flint Rivers, all combined to reduce the number of oysters in the bay.
But after a five-year closure, the FWC has determined that the bay can be opened again for a short season from January 1 to February 28. Harvesters seeking a permit have only a few days left to apply—the application window closes on December 16. There are 245 permits available, and harvesters will be allowed to land one bag of oysters (60 pounds) per day. Each harvester will receive a tag for a specific reef, which will need to meet an ecological threshold of 400 legal-sized oysters per acre in order to be open.
Moving forward, the Apalachicola Bay System Ecosystem-Based Adaptive Restoration and Management Plan will regulate seasons and harvest levels. Part of the broader Apalachicola Bay System Initiative, the plan is a multi-year, multi-discipline, multi-agency and organizational collaboration that will be implemented in cooperation with the community-based, Partnership for a Resilient Apalachicola Bay.
Funding for all the research and organizing leading to the reopening has come from Triumph Gulf Inc—which disperses money from the Deepwater Horizon oil spill settlement—Florida State University (FSU), and the Pew Charitable Trusts.
But in and of themselves, all these efforts cannot bring back the oysters notes lead researcher, Dr. Sandra Brooke of FSU. “Science can help us facilitate oyster population recovery,” she says. “And restoration can be implemented with funding, but only the oyster can recreate a functioning ecosystem, and that will take time.”
