The ultimate in environmentally friendly recycling programs launched Friday at the Original Oyster House on the edge of Mobile Bay. From now on, the shell of every oyster shucked at the restaurant will be saved and returned to Mobile Bay’s oyster reefs. It’s not just the Oyster House either. The rest of the Causeway restaurants will also participate in the Alabama Coastal Foundation program, along with the Half Shell Oyster House in Spanish Fort. Eventually, it will be expanded to the restaurants in Orange Beach and Gulf Shores. Biologists say it is one of the best things we can do to help restore the bay’s dwindling oyster beds. Such a program has been a long time coming.
For a century, the oysters tonged from the bay have been eaten greedily by the hungry masses with scant attention paid to the hunk of rock the delicious meats were pulled from. As a result, the reefs have steadily dwindled, forever losing volume. The empty shells, meanwhile, met all sorts of fates, from simply being thrown in the garbage, to being crushed for use in concrete, or used to line parking lots and driveways.
That’s a shame, for there is nothing baby oysters like to grow on so much as an old oyster shell. That has always been the secret ingredient for our native reefs, made of nothing but old oyster shells. In recent years, the state has spent millions of dollars planting crushed oyster shells on the reefs in an effort to provide something for baby oysters to cling to.
Known as cultch, this material for the larval oysters to attach to is a critical ingredient in the life cycle of the oyster. That’s because baby oysters are not born attached to rocks or reefs. Instead, for the first several weeks of life, baby oysters are free swimming creatures. During this phase of life, they drift with the current, consuming plankton and growing. After about three weeks, the baby oysters will settle to the bottom and search out something hard to stick to. If they are lucky enough to land on something hard, they will remain attached to it for their entire life.
“I call it the secret life of the oyster,” said Beth Walton, public engagement coordinator for the Coastal Foundation. “It’s this period where they swim in the water and are microscopic. It’s kind of like when a caterpillar becomes a butterfly. They go through the same kind of thing called a metamorphosis. And then this shell we are recycling, that provides something they can attach to and hang onto and grow and come together and form the reef. (Those reefs) provide food value, habitat value, they prevent erosion. They do all kinds of things.”
Chris Blankenship, director of the state’s Marine Resources Division, said the shells were too valuable to waste. “This is something we’ve needed in Alabama for a long time. We spend a lot of money purchasing shell as a cultch material because it is the best material to expand the reef and to continue to enhance it,” Blankenship said. “We had a bunch of shell that was going to the landfill and it was killing all of us that it wasn’t being used. This is a great program to bring together the restaurants, the environmental groups and then the state to be able to get these shells and be able to use them where they can grow more oysters.”
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