State, local interests at odds over management of Alabama oyster reefs

But he also acknowledged that breaking the law is an easy decision for some fishermen, especially as oyster prices have reached 75 cents per pound or more. 

"If people know there is money laying out there, of course they are going to be fishing it whether it is open or closed,” Williams said. “I don’t agree with it, but nobody has to be out there stealing oysters, because this community could be thriving instead of in poverty, if only the state would open the reefs.”

Williams is also the president of the Alabama Commercial Fishing Association, an emerging nonprofit advocacy organization representing about 600 members. He encourages compliance with regulations and suggested it can be difficult lobbying for some of the group’s more independent members, especially those who have a history of citations or don’t pay taxes. 

“I think we’d have a little more influence if everyone played by the rules but for a lot of us, this is the only thing we know how to do,” he said. 

After the reef was suddenly closed in December, Williams and his wife started an online petition encouraging the state to leave the waters open for the full oyster season. It has since garnered nearly 500 signatures.

“Opening the reef until season's end would allow Alabama's oyster fisherman to surplus Alabama's oyster market and revive the local market and economy,” the petition states. “This is beneficial to the community, local small businesses and the oyster fisherman and many others who benefit from Alabama oysters.”

If Alabama’s oyster reefs are indeed thriving, they would be an anomaly in the Gulf of Mexico. In Texas, only about one-third of its 29 public reefs were opened this year due to “a variety of environmental factors and localized harvest pressures.” Florida shut down Apalachicola Bay – once the Gulf’s most prolific oyster reef – for a period of five years after the population there decreased to the point of total collapse. Mississippi faced many of the same problems as Alabama, but its harvest was largely destroyed after the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers opened floodgates on the Mississippi River in 2011 and 2019, resulting in a freshwater flushing of the reefs, along with millions of cubic yards of silt covering the hard bottom they need to grow. 

Oysters can only grow naturally in certain hard bottom estuaries, within specific salinity requirements demanding a constant give and take from both freshwater and saltwater sources. Inundation from flood waters upstream can leave them vulnerable to bacteria and siltation, while too much salinity — the result of droughts, strong tides, changing currents and storm surges — invites pathogens and parasitic worms and oyster drills, among other plagues. 

In the ideal environment, they are prolific. Females can spawn 100 million eggs each. Adults can live more than 10 years and grow 8 to 10 inches. Early in the 20th century, Alabama’s reefs were so prolific they supported three full-time canneries which shipped oysters nationwide. They produced so much shell waste, they were used to pave some of the county’s early roads. 

Scott Bannon, director of the Marine Resources Division, said the environment for Alabama oysters has noticeably improved in recent years, but believes it would be foolish to allow fishermen to exploit it. 

“We've been seeing some positive things occur out there and a lot of it is due to naturally occurring things but we attribute some of it to good management,” he said by phone Wednesday. “We have to keep the resource there for longevity. We're in a positive trend right now and some oyster catchers think at any time that could tip the other way, so we should harvest everything we can. But as a resource manager, I can't set the goal of ‘let's take everything we can in case something bad happens.’ We have to lean toward the positive and continue to build on the resource while it is healthy.”

Bannon explained that the harvest limit is determined by preseason surveys small portions of the public reefs, but the limit can be adjusted during the harvest depending on what officers observe. It was stopped on Dec. 23 because more fishermen participated than the state expected and their catch was increasingly undersized as the reef was worked. 

“It’s not an exact science but we try to get as realistic a view as we can,” he said. 

Bannon wouldn’t speak about the Lyons case or others specifically, but said blatant theft of the oysters is concerning primarily because it may occur when the waters are closed for bacterial contamination, or there may be health hazards from the way the oysters were handled and processed. 

Separately, organizations including the Marine Resources Division have been awarded more than $18 million in fines and penalties from the BP oil spill to attempt to rebuild the oyster population. Bannon couldn’t speak to all of the projects since funded with the money, but suggested a state-sponsored project to study the effects of planting oysters in rows and mounds to experiment with different levels of oxygen in the water column was successful and results should be available soon. The agency has also invested in a new tong system which should allow it to perform more surveys once it is deployed this year, Bannon added. 

Separately, the agency is also building an oyster hatchery which is expected to produce an estimated 65 million larvae per year. Once operational, the larvae will be distributed to various locations in Mobile Bay and the Mississippi Sound to bolster natural populations.

Bannon also noted the practice of off-bottom oyster farming in the state has also grown in leaps and bounds since it was introduced around 2009. But where there were once as many as 21 licensed private oyster farming operations, today there are only 11 to 15. 

“Some people got into the business and found out that it’s a tremendous amount of work and very labor intensive,” he said. “Of course they also have to deal with some of the same environmental conditions such as salinity, bacteria or pollution. But those that are successful have built a market around it and figured out a way to manage the labor side of it.”

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