SMITH POINTE, Texas (CN) - Standing in a refrigerated room at his seafood wholesaler, Tracy Woody, general manager of Jeri's Seafood, tossed back a raw oyster newly shucked for inspection.
"Not much salt," Woody said. The tables lining the wall behind him were piled high with oysters scheduled to be shucked the next day.
Since oysters feed by filtering the water in which they live, a salty oyster could mean high salt levels in the water. This in turn could speak to problems in the oyster's habitat. Salty water brings more predators, and the oysters have to focus their energy on growing thicker shells instead of growing fat within.
The water has been salty in recent years, and a combination of overfishing and environmental factors has thinned the harvest in Galveston Bay.
Woody found himself last year at the center of a fight between oyster companies and government agencies when he leased 23,000 acres of submerged land from the Chambers-Liberty Counties Navigation District to cultivate and harvest oysters outside of the state's defined oyster-fishing waters.
Other fishermen argue - and Texas Parks and Wildlife agree - that the district did not have the authority to grant Woody a lease. In a civil suit to have Woody's lease enjoined, his competitors claim that Woody and the navigation board discussed the lease behind closed doors and crafted public agendas in vague terms to conceal deliberations from the public.
"No one attended any of those meetings," David Feldman, the attorney who filed the April 17 complaint said in an interview.
"If other oystermen had known, they would have been hanging from the rafters at those meetings," said Feldman, who represents plaintiffs from five Galveston-based oyster companies.
Oyster fishing in Texas was a $23.4 million industry in 2013. Most of the oyster harvest in Texas comes out of public reefs in Galveston Bay, a 600 square-mile stretch of water isolated from the Gulf of Mexico by Galveston Island. Hundreds of boats from local oyster companies crowd into the bay at the start of oyster season to fish for a dwindling population of oysters. A 2011 drought shrank the flow of fresh water into Galveston Bay, which increased the bay's salinity.
Lance Robinson, deputy director for the coastal fisheries division of Texas Parks and Wildlife, said Hurricane Ike in 2008, the Deep Water Horizon explosion in 2010 and overfishing have contributed to the declining oyster population from the Texas coast to Louisiana.
"The fleet and the industry are overcapitalized," Robinson added.
Woody meanwhile noted that harvesting too many oysters - especially oysters under the legal limit - can prevent a reef from growing. Oyster reefs are built atop the carcasses of dead oysters. If the public reefs are overfished, and there are not enough oysters left to die, the reef cannot sustain itself, Woody said.
Public oyster season is from November until the end of April. Woody said overfishing emptied the public reefs within two weeks of this year's season.
"There were 150 to 170 boats in east bay at the beginning of the season," Woody said. "And in less than two weeks those reefs were decimated."
Robinson said Texas offers private oyster leases, but their primary purpose is not to support the oyster-fishing industry. They are meant to detour rogue oyster fishermen from harvesting potentially toxic oysters from waters close to shore.