Alabama oyster harvest doubles previous year’s totals
Alabama oysters are known for having a meatier texture than some oysters have. Demand for them is high. (David Rainer / Alabama Department of Natural Resources)
Alabama’s oyster harvest numbers in 2020 doubled the previous year, indicating the state’s ecosystem is bouncing back in a big way.
Last year’s harvest was 22,000 sacks, thanks to improving conditions and a new method developed by the Alabama Marine Resources Division (MRD) to determine when and where oysters can be harvested.
“I think it was a very successful season,” said Col. Scott Bannon, MRD director. “We think we are turning a corner on the things that we can control, which is the amount of harvest and the areas harvested as we work to rebuild our public reefs. As long as environmental conditions are favorable, I think we’re going to continue to see growth.”
Bannon said demand for Alabama oysters is high, not only because of their quality, but also because Texas was the only other Gulf state with a fully open oyster season.
“It was a high-value product for a limited availability due to COVID,” he said. “COVID still had a negative impact on the oystering because there are still places around the country that are not open to sit-down-style dining. That’s where oysters generally are consumed in the half-shell market. The quarts and gallons of shucked oysters still had a market in stores, but COVID did have an impact.”
Alabama oyster catchers had much greater success in 2020 than the previous year despite COVID-19. (David Rainer/Alabama Department of Conservation and Natural Resources)
Anna’s Seafood in Bayou La Batre has been processing oysters for 28 years from sources around the Gulf of Mexico. Dana Harbison Taylor of Anna’s said the 2020 Alabama season was a welcome success despite the pandemic.
“This year I saw more boats, so more people were interested in catching oysters,” Taylor said. “And I saw larger oysters than last year, which means the oysters are growing. Also, I could tell by how fast the oyster catchers were coming in. It shows how many oysters were there. They weren’t scratching, as we call it, trying to find oysters. They were catching them pretty fast.”
Taylor said the demand for Alabama oysters was excellent for a variety of reasons.
“People had a lot of interest in Alabama oysters because they have a meatier texture, so they were fatter,” she said. “They were salty. They have an all-around different taste. We have a lot of locals and businesses that requested Alabama oysters. We had a truck waiting on the catchers to bring the oysters in. We were determined to buy Alabama oysters.”
Bannon said there were up to 144 oyster boats harvesting and turning the water bottom, which is healthy for reefs. When there is no oyster harvest, shells may become silted over.
“When you expose that shell and cultch material, it makes it available for spat (oyster larvae) to attach for future seasons,” Bannon said. “It’s that harvester’s circle: You work the reef, the spat sets and the reef expands.”
Bannon said development of a grid system for management of the oyster reefs allowed MRD to be more flexible in opening and closing areas to harvest.
“During the (2019) season, we had some areas where harvesters were concentrating and probably overworking,” Bannon said. “But we felt there were other areas with harvestable oysters (at least 3 inches in length) they were not accessing, and we didn’t have a mechanism to close portions of areas we had open. We developed a grid system with 500-by-500-square-meter grids so we could open and close those grids. Now we can use the grid system to narrow the areas of harvest.
“That does multiple things,” Bannon said. “It gives us an idea of specific areas where people are harvesting, which helps account for the oysters that are coming off the reef. We can then compare that area harvest to our preseason surveys and make season adjustments.”
Oyster harvesters can go to www.outdooralabama.com/fishing/saltwater-fishing and look for the Oyster OMS Grid Map tab. Once there they can turn on location services, which will show the harvesters which grid they are in at the time. If harvesters don’t have a smartphone, MRD has an oyster management trailer available to provide graphics with the latest information.
“Marine Resources does not gather any information from those location services,” Bannon said. “We do not see the location of the oyster catcher from the website. We’re not tracking people. It’s there for the catchers’ benefit, and some of the catchers really liked it. They were able to move around. Some of them were really able to take advantage of it. I think it was a very effective tool to allow them to harvest maximum yield.”
MRD determines maximum yield by doing preseason dives and surveying 1-square-meter blocks of the bottom to determine the oyster density and viability of the oyster habitat.
Despite the encouraging results of the 2020 oyster season, MRD is working to revive some oyster reefs that have not been productive lately in Mobile Bay. Bannon said they are expanding the oyster hatchery in Gulf Shores (Claude Peteet Mariculture Center) to produce oyster larvae to be delivered to an expanded program at Dauphin Island.
“Oysters are important, not only for harvest – we all enjoy that – but they are critical to the ecosystem,” Bannon said. “They are crucial for water quality, and they are important as a food supply for some of the other marine species. You need a good supply of oysters to have a healthy harvest and a healthy ecosystem.”
