Saving Seafood

TEXAS: How a Battle Between Recreational and Commercial Fishermen Spawned a Conservation Movement

April 16, 2020 — On fall and winter nights through the better part of the twentieth century, Rudy Grigar would wade into Galveston Bay and listen to the roar of the redfish. Swimming in schools up to five hundred strong, they sounded to him like freight trains churning through the dark. “The closer they got,” he recalled in a 1997 memoir, “the louder the noise.”

Occasionally, the schools would plow right into Grigar, a pioneer of wade-fishing in Texas, thumping against his legs and chest as he cast in the moonlight, trying his best to land two or three on a silver spoon lure before they swept past. Then he’d wait for another school to come along. “I’d repeat the process until I had a full stringer,” Grigar wrote in Plugger: Wade Fishing the Gulf Coast, a book that remains a saltwater-angling bible long after Grigar’s death in 2001 at age 86.

Grigar, who owned a tackle shop in Houston, had been fishing the state’s shallow bays and estuaries since the Great Depression. In the early seventies, he was still landing countless bounties of redfish, also known as red drum, and up to a hundred speckled trout in a day. By the end of that decade, though, the glory days had come to an end. Trout were in steep decline, and more than half of the redfish had disappeared.

Read the full story at Texas Monthly

TEXAS: Oysters in Galveston Bay are on the rebound. Will it stay that way?

March 31, 2020 — Joaquin Padilla steered his white oyster boat, MISS KOSOVARE, in deliberate, counter-clockwise circles on an unusually placid Galveston Bay. The boat’s oyster dredge — a chain mesh net with a heavy steel frame – dragged on the port side of the boat along the floor of the bay, raking up dozens of oysters of various sizes.

Padilla lifted the dredge out of the water using a crank, and the net dumped a pile of oysters on a small table. His deckhands, Jaime Martinez and Miguel Vasquez, quickly went to work cleaning and sorting oysters, hammering with mechanical precision and chucking rocks and dead or undersized oysters back into the water.

As a kid growing up in San Leon and working as a deckhand for his fisherman-uncle, Padilla remembered seeing up to 150 oyster boats in Galveston Bay, competing for an abundant harvest.

Read the full story at The Houston Chronicle

Gulf of Mexico Oysters are in Trouble, but There’s Hope and a Plan

November 28, 2018 — Oysters in the Gulf of Mexico have seen better days.

Aside from the Deepwater Horizon explosion and oil spill in 2010 — which killed between 4 and 8.3 billion adult oysters, according to NOAA — changes in freshwater flow along the Gulf and sedimentation caused by more frequent storms have taken their toll on the Gulf’s oyster population.

But all hope is not lost. In fact, there’s even a plan, according to a report by environmental organization The Nature Conservancy (TNC).

Compared to historic levels, an estimated 85 percent of the Gulf’s oyster population has been lost, and the impact ranges further than the $100-million-per-year market they provide.

Oyster beds in the Gulf are vital in improving water quality, providing protection from shoreline erosion and serving as a habitat for fish and wildlife.

The impact of waves, boat wakes and storm surge on the Gulf’s shoreline is reduced by oyster reefs. Reefs are also unique in that they can continue to grow to keep up with or even outpace sea level rise, according to an entry in the journal Nature, something hard sea walls can’t do.

Additionally, a single oyster can filter 50 gallons of water in one day. In places like Galveston Bay, a 130-acre reef containing 10 oysters per square meter would be capable of filtering about 260 million gallons of water each day. In comparison, Houston’s 39 wastewater treatment plants combined to filter 252 million gallons per day in 2009, according to Texas Parks and Wildlife.

Read the full story at The Weather Channel

Restoration projects seek to fight “tragic” decline in Gulf of Mexico oyster population

November 19, 2018 — Last week, the Alabama Department of Conservation and Natural Resources officially moved to cancel the state’s wild oyster season, which would have run from November through April.

Exploratory dives at oyster harvesting grounds had revealed a continued steep decline in the number of oysters in the state’s waters. Last year’s season was curtailed after fishermen harvested just 136 110-pound sacks of oysters, down from 7,000 sacks in 2013, according to the Associated Press.

Scott Bannon, director of the Marine Resources Division of the Alabama Department of Conservation and Natural Resources, said the findings revealed the apparent collapse of the region’s oyster ecology.

“It’s tragic, to be honest,” Bannon told AL.com.

Numerous factors have dealt blows not just to Alabama’s oyster grounds, but those of the entire Gulf of Mexico. The Deepwater Horizon oil spill, hurricanes, disease, and changes in freshwater flows to Gulf rivers and streams have collectively damaged the fishery to the point where up to 85 percent of the gulf’s original oyster reefs no longer remain intact.

According to a new report by The Nature Conservancy, “Oyster Restoration in the Gulf of Mexico,” this dramatic decline has damaged the stability and productivity of the Gulf’s estuaries and harmed coastal economies.

Seth Blitch, the director of coastal and marine conservation in Louisiana for The Nature Conservancy, told SeafoodSource the oyster habitat and the oyster fishery “is not in a particularly good place right now,” which could spell bigger problems for the region.

“Oysters, to me, are a great proxy to a lot of things,” he said. “If oysters are doing well, that’s a good indication of good water quality and of the health entire near-shore estuarine system. When oysters start to fail, that’s good indication there are larger issues at play.”

Read the full story at Seafood Source

Reef restoration projects aim to bolster Texas’ record-low oyster population

November 16, 2018 — With oyster populations in Texas at historic lows, The Nature Conservancy is launching two new reef restoration projects that look to appease commercial fishermen and environmentalists alike.

Using funds from the Deepwater Horizon oil spill settlement, the group plans to develop 110 acres of reef in Galveston Bay and Copano Bay, near Rockport. Half of each reef will be designated as a marine sanctuary where the molluscs — which have significant economic and environmental benefits — may grow. The other half will be open for commercial fishing.

Construction of the new reefs is expected to begin this winter, with harvestable portions ready as soon as 2021.

Laura Huffman, regional director of The Nature Conservancy in Texas, said these projects show a new approach to oyster reef restoration, with the compatibility of building harvestable reefs at the same time as growing a healthy habitat.

Read the full story at KPRC 2 Houston

TEXAS: Gulf Oysterman Displays Heroics During Hurricane Harvey Flooding

September 11, 2017 — Sitting in his Kemah, TX home on Galveston Bay, Raz Halili was sure the small tropical storm named Harvey hovering off the coast of Texas was of little concern. A week later with his family’s oyster damaged, shrimp boats sunk, fishermen’s homes underwater or destroyed he realized his miscalculations on the impact of Hurricane Harvey.

Halili, a Board Member of the Gulf Seafood Foundation, considers himself lucky. Although the family oyster business, Prestige Oysters, suffered damage to both buildings and docks, his family was safe and houses stayed dry.

Worst Flood in U.S. History

“The small tropical storm that everyone thought was going to be no big deal turned into the worse flooding disaster in U.S. history of our country,” said the Galveston oysterman. “It is just devastating when viewed first hand. But there was a silver lining. In this time of need our community came together to help each other without regard to race, religion or political views. This is Texas spirit and the true character of America.”

While Harvey was dumping more than 30 inches of rain on the Houston area, Halili and his cousins, Gezim Halili, an oyster boat captain for the family business and Fatmir Halili, took to jet skis to perform water rescues as floodwaters rose in Dickerson, Friendswood and Port Arthur.

“We would leave the house in the early morning, do water rescues for more than 12 hours and then come back to relocate our refrigerated trucks from different shelter to keep food from spoiling,” he said. “We didn’t really count the number of people we ferried from their flooded homes to dry land, it was helping in any way we could.”

One of the most harrowing experiences for Halili’s was rescuing a man who had managed to flip his canoe in the middle of a rushing creek while trying to get back to his flooded house in Houston. “We managed to scoop him up, but it’s a great possibility if we weren’t there he wouldn’t have survived,” said the Jet Ski hero.

Read the full story at the Gulf Seafood Foundation

Recent heavy rains, flooding take toll on Texas oysters

June 16, 2016 — GALVESTON, Texas — Johnny Halili tossed an open oyster shell overboard. Like most of the oysters culled from the floor of Galveston Bay on Tuesday, it was dead.

“Three more years,” he said.

The Galveston County Daily News reports recent heavy rains and flooding along the Brazos River sent freshwater draining into the bay, pushing down the bay’s salinity — the amount of salt in the water. The influx of freshwater is choking some young oysters.

Oysters are resilient animals. But Texas’ oysters have taken a succession of hits in recent years: first it was Hurricane Ike in 2008, which dumped sediment over the bay floor; then prolonged drought, which made the water too salty. Now, heavy rains are the latest assault on oysters.

For oystermen, Mother Nature’s twists and turns have created a costly waiting game.

Halili, who with his wife, Lisa, owns Prestige Oysters in San Leon, tested salinity levels at some of his oyster leases last week after days of rain and flooding. One of his tests found a salinity level of zero parts per thousand, or freshwater.

Oysters thrive with salinity levels around 14 parts per thousand, Halili said.

Read the full story from the Associated Press at the Galveston County Daily News