The WFSU Ecology Blog
  • Home
    • About
    • EcoAdventures
      • Kayak and Canoe Adventures
      • Hiking
      • Wildlife Watching
    • Observations From the Field
      • White Pelicans Visit Dr. Charles L. Evans Pond in Tallahassee
      • An April Walk at Ochlockonee River WMA
      • Nesting Raptors at Honeymoon Island State Park
    • WFSU Public Media Home
  • Documentaries
    • In Their Words: Black Legacy Communities in North Florida
    • EcoCitizen Show | Seasons in South Tallahassee
    • Red Wolf Family Celebrates First Year at the Tallahassee Museum
    • Roaming the Red Hills
    • Oyster Doctors
    • Testing the Ecology of Fear
    • EcoShakespeare
    • Stories from the Apalachicola
    • Classic WFSU Ecology Documentaries
  • Habitats
    • Estuaries
      • Oyster Reef
        • The Effects of Predators and Fear on Oyster Reefs
        • Apalachicola Oyster Research
        • Animal Species in a North Florida Intertidal Oyster Reef
        • Oyster Reef Ecology | On the Reef
      • Salt Marsh
        • In the Grass- Salt Marsh Biodiversity Study
        • Plants and Animals of a North Florida Salt Marsh
        • Salt Marsh Ecology | In the Grass
      • Seagrass Bed
        • Predatory Snails, and Prey, of the Bay Mouth Bar Seagrass Beds
      • In the Grass, On the Reef Glossary
    • Waterways Big and Small
      • Aucilla/ Wacissa Watershed
      • Apalachicola Basin
        • Apalachicola Bluffs and Ravines | Virtual Field Trip
        • The Age of Nature Screening & Discussion | The Future of the Apalachicola
        • Apalachicola River and Bay
        • Apalachicola RiverTrek | Kayaking, Camping, & Hiking the River Basin
    • Longleaf Pine & Fire Ecology
  • Backyard Habitat
    • Backyard Blog
      • My Year in Bugs: the 2022 Backyard Blog
      • Backyard Ecology Blog | 2021
      • Backyard Blog November/ December 2020
      • Backyard Blog September/ October 2020
      • July and August 2020 Backyard Blog
      • Backyard Blog June 2020
      • Backyard Blog May 2020
      • Backyard Blog April 2020
      • Backyard Blog February and March 2020
      • Backyard Blog January 2020
      • Backyard Blog October through December 2019
      • Backyard Blog September 2019
      • Backyard Blog August 2019
      • Backyard Blog July 2019
      • Backyard Blog June 2019
      • Backyard Blog May 2019
      • Backyard Blog April 2019
      • Backyard Blog March 2019
      • Backyard Blog February 2019
      • Backyard Blog January 2019
      • The Backyard Bug Blog 2018
    • Backyard Flora and Fauna
      • Bees of North Florida and South Georgia
      • The Seasonality of Bees (and Bee Plants) in North Florida
      • Woody Vines of North Florida
      • Flies of North Florida are More Diverse than You’d Think
      • The Case for Weeds, Our Unsung Florida Native Plants
      • Devil’s Walkingstick: Your New Favorite Thorny Pollinator Plant?
      • Florida Native Milkweed | Tips for Growing Your Monarch Friendly Garden
      • Mistletoe | A Parasite for the Holidays (But Maybe We Like it Anyway?)
    • Florida Friendly Seasonal Planting Guide
    • Pollinator and Gardening Posts
    • Gardening Web Resources
Kayak and Canoe Adventures
RiverTrek 2021: Five Days on the Apalachicola River
Lower Lake Lafayette: Kayak Tallahassee’s Hidden Swamp
Chipola River Paddling Trail | The Ovens and...
Kayaking Bald Point | Adventure on a Living...
Wacissa Springs Adventure | Kayaking a Wild Florida...
A Geologist’s View of the Apalachicola River |...
Upper Chipola River Kayak Adventure | Ghosts &...
Tate’s Hell & the Apalachicola River Delta |...
Kayak Scouting Mission on the Ochlockonee Water Trail
Merritt’s Mill Pond | Kayaking and Spring Caves

The WFSU Ecology Blog

  • Home
    • About
    • EcoAdventures
      • Kayak and Canoe Adventures
      • Hiking
      • Wildlife Watching
    • Observations From the Field
      • White Pelicans Visit Dr. Charles L. Evans Pond in Tallahassee
      • An April Walk at Ochlockonee River WMA
      • Nesting Raptors at Honeymoon Island State Park
    • WFSU Public Media Home
  • Documentaries
    • In Their Words: Black Legacy Communities in North Florida
    • EcoCitizen Show | Seasons in South Tallahassee
    • Red Wolf Family Celebrates First Year at the Tallahassee Museum
    • Roaming the Red Hills
    • Oyster Doctors
    • Testing the Ecology of Fear
    • EcoShakespeare
    • Stories from the Apalachicola
    • Classic WFSU Ecology Documentaries
  • Habitats
    • Estuaries
      • Oyster Reef
        • The Effects of Predators and Fear on Oyster Reefs
        • Apalachicola Oyster Research
        • Animal Species in a North Florida Intertidal Oyster Reef
        • Oyster Reef Ecology | On the Reef
      • Salt Marsh
        • In the Grass- Salt Marsh Biodiversity Study
        • Plants and Animals of a North Florida Salt Marsh
        • Salt Marsh Ecology | In the Grass
      • Seagrass Bed
        • Predatory Snails, and Prey, of the Bay Mouth Bar Seagrass Beds
      • In the Grass, On the Reef Glossary
    • Waterways Big and Small
      • Aucilla/ Wacissa Watershed
      • Apalachicola Basin
        • Apalachicola Bluffs and Ravines | Virtual Field Trip
        • The Age of Nature Screening & Discussion | The Future of the Apalachicola
        • Apalachicola River and Bay
        • Apalachicola RiverTrek | Kayaking, Camping, & Hiking the River Basin
    • Longleaf Pine & Fire Ecology
  • Backyard Habitat
    • Backyard Blog
      • My Year in Bugs: the 2022 Backyard Blog
      • Backyard Ecology Blog | 2021
      • Backyard Blog November/ December 2020
      • Backyard Blog September/ October 2020
      • July and August 2020 Backyard Blog
      • Backyard Blog June 2020
      • Backyard Blog May 2020
      • Backyard Blog April 2020
      • Backyard Blog February and March 2020
      • Backyard Blog January 2020
      • Backyard Blog October through December 2019
      • Backyard Blog September 2019
      • Backyard Blog August 2019
      • Backyard Blog July 2019
      • Backyard Blog June 2019
      • Backyard Blog May 2019
      • Backyard Blog April 2019
      • Backyard Blog March 2019
      • Backyard Blog February 2019
      • Backyard Blog January 2019
      • The Backyard Bug Blog 2018
    • Backyard Flora and Fauna
      • Bees of North Florida and South Georgia
      • The Seasonality of Bees (and Bee Plants) in North Florida
      • Woody Vines of North Florida
      • Flies of North Florida are More Diverse than You’d Think
      • The Case for Weeds, Our Unsung Florida Native Plants
      • Devil’s Walkingstick: Your New Favorite Thorny Pollinator Plant?
      • Florida Native Milkweed | Tips for Growing Your Monarch Friendly Garden
      • Mistletoe | A Parasite for the Holidays (But Maybe We Like it Anyway?)
    • Florida Friendly Seasonal Planting Guide
    • Pollinator and Gardening Posts
    • Gardening Web Resources
Oyster Reef Ecology | On the ReefWildlife in North Florida- Critters Big and Small

What’s the deal with nutrients and oysters?

by David January 30, 2013
by David January 30, 2013 3 comments

As David & co. start their new research on the Apalachicola oyster fishery crisis, He and Randall (and their colleagues in Georgia and North Carolina) are starting to wrap up the NSF funded oyster study that we have been following over the last couple of years.  Over the next few weeks, we’ll take a look back at that research through a series of videos.  We’ll cover some oyster basics (how does an animal with no brain behave?), explore David and Randall’s ideas on the role of fear on the oyster reef (what makes a mud crab too afraid to eat an oyster?), and see the day-to-day problem solving and ingenuity it takes to complete a major study.  As these videos are released, we’ll also keep tabs on the work being done in Apalachicola Bay, in which many of the same methods will be used.
Dr. David Kimbro FSU Coastal & Marine Lab

After all, nutrients are basically plant food and oysters are animals.  And how could too few nutrients coming down with the trickling flow of the Apalachicola River possibly explain the record low number of Apalachicola oysters?

This is the perfect time to use the favorite idiom of my former mentor Dr. Ted, “The long and the short of it is….”

The short of it: Plants love nutrients and sunlight as much as I like pizza and beer. But unlike my favorite foods, these plant goodies make plants grow fast and strong. This works out well for us because we all need nutrients for basic body functioning, and because we get them by eating plants and/or by the eating animals that previously consumed plants.

For our filter-feeding bivalve brethren, they get nutrients and energy by eating plant-like cells (phytoplankton) that float in the water. So, it is possible that the trickling flow of the Apalachicola River is bringing too few nutrients to support the size of the pizza buffet to which the Apalachicola oysters are accustomed. But this idea has yet to be tested.

Hanna Garland and Stephanie Buhler harvest oysters from sample reefs in Apalachicola Bay. 

The long of it: Long before the flow of the Apalachicola River slowed to a trickle, there weren’t a lot of nutrients. That’s why the numbers of humans used to be so low: too few nutrients meant too few plants and other animals for us to eat.

How could this possibly be the case given that 78% of the air we breathe is made up of a very important plant nutrient, nitrogen? And there is a lot of air out there!

Well, only a precious few plants exist that can deal with the nitrogen in our air and these are called nitrogen-fixers. Think of these as single-lane, windy, and bumpy dirt roads. In order to help create a plant buffet for all of us animals, a lot of atmospheric nitrogen (bio-unavailable) has to travel down this very slow road that the n-fixers maintain. As a result, it naturally takes a long time for the land to become fertile enough for a large buffet. And, it only takes a couple of crop plantings to wipe out this whole supply of bio-available nitrogen that took so long to accumulate.

guano island

Sea birds on a guano island off the coast of Peru. (zand.net)

Turns out that the ancient Inca civilization around Peru was not only lucky, but they were also pretty darn smart. Lucky, because they lived next to coastal islands that were basically big piles of bird poop, which is very rich in bio-available nitrogen. I’m talking thousands of years of pooping on the same spot! Smart, because they somehow figured out that spreading this on their fields by-passed that slow n-fixing road and allowed them to grow lots of food. Once Columbus tied the world together, lots of bird poop was shipped back to European farms for the same reason. That’s when the European population of humans sky-rocketed.

Turns out that humans in general are pretty smart. Through time, some chemists figured out how to create artificial bird poop, which we now cheaply dump a lot of on our farming land. So, in these modern days, we are very, very rich in bio-available nutrients.

Where am I going with the long of it? Well, on the one hand, these nutrients wash off into rivers and then float down into estuaries. This is how the phytoplankton that oysters eat can benefit from our solution to the slow n-fixing road. In turn, oysters thrive on this big phytoplankton buffet.

Slide by Ashley R. Smyth, Piehler Lab, UNC Chapel Hill Institute of Marine Sciences.

But, on the other hand, too much of these nutrients flowing down into our estuaries can create big problems. Every year, tons of nutrient-rich water makes it way down the Mississippi and into the shallow Gulf of Mexico waters. There, this stuff fuels one big time buffet of phytoplankton, which goes unconsumed. Once these guys live their short lives, they sink to the bottom and are broken down by bacteria. All this bacterial activity decreases the oxygen of water and in turn gives us the infamous dead zone. Because nutrient-rich run-off continues to increase every year, so too does the dead zone.

I’ll close with the thought that oysters themselves may help keep the phytoplankton buffet from getting out of control by acting like anti-nitrogen fixers. In other words, they may help convert an excess of useable nitrogen back into bio-unavailable nitrogen. While this might not have been a great thing to have in low nutrient situations, we currently live in a nutrient-rich era. What’s even cooler is that it all has to do with poop again! But this time, we are talking oyster poop.

Oyster Summit 6

Dr. Mike Piehler, presenting to his collaborators Dr. Jeb Byers (Right), Dr. Jon Grabowski (reclined on couch), Dr. Randall Hughes and Dr. David Kimbro (out of frame). These five researchers have worked on oyster reef ecology since their time at the University of North Carolina. Three years ago, the National Science Foundation funded research into their ideas about predators and fear on oyster reefs.

So does this really happen? Yes. Check out an earlier post for the details. But we don’t fully understand it and that’s why it is a major focus of our research. Our collaborator, Dr. Michael Piehler of UNC-Chapel Hill, is leading this portion of our research project. Read more of Dr. Piehler’s work on this topic here.

So, hopefully this post explains why the relationship between nutrients and oysters is not so simple. But it sure is interesting and a worthy thing to keep studying!

Cheers,
David

In the Grass, On the Reef is funded by the National Science Foundation.

We want to hear from you! Add your question or comment.
Facebook Comments
ApalachicolaApalachicola Riverdenitrificationnitrogennitrogen fixingnutrientsoysterphytoplankton
3 comments
1
FacebookTwitterRedditEmail
David

previous post
Notes From the Field: Becoming an Oyster Woman
next post
Fear and the Choices Oysters Make

Related Posts

RiverTrek 2013 Preview: A Year in the Apalachicola...

August 29, 2013

Shorebirds in the Misty Morning | Surveying the...

December 15, 2020

What is the WFSU EcoCitizen Project?

January 31, 2019

The Zen of Labwork

February 17, 2011

The strange and dangerous love lives of zebra...

September 28, 2022

Adopting an Ephemeral Wetland | Kids’ Adventures in...

June 8, 2017

Red Wolf Family Celebrates First Year at the...

April 12, 2018

The Apalachicola Bay Situation Report: A Quick Take

April 26, 2013

Bringing the Striped Newt Back to the Munson...

May 19, 2016

Butterfly Watching and Research in the Red Hills

November 19, 2015

3 comments

Robin Rickel Vroegop January 31, 2013 - 11:38 am

Thanks for “breakin’ this down” to my layperson’s level Dr. K. This is the first time I fully understood the Nitrogen cycle!

David February 2, 2013 - 7:25 pm

Hi Robin,

you are most welcome, and thanks for following the blog!

Best,
David

WFSU In the Grass, On the Reef February 6, 2013 - 2:33 pm

[…] Donate Skip to content HomeThe ScienceThe “In the Grass, On the Reef” Master PlanCoastal Habitat Quick DictionarySalt MarshIn the Grass- Salt Marsh Biodiversity StudyMeet the Species “In the Grass”Oyster ReefOn the Reef- The Biogeographic Oyster StudyMeet the Species “On (and swimming around) the Reef”Watch Oysters GrowJacksonvilleSaint AugustineAlligator HarborSeagrass BedPredatory Snails, and Prey, of Bay Mouth BarIn the Grass, On the Reef DocumentaryEcoAdventures North FloridaEcoAdventures HomeActivitiesPaddlingHikingBird/ Wildlife WatchingArt/ PhotographyHistory/ ArcheologyApalachicola River and Bay Basin ← What’s the deal with nutrients and oysters? […]

Comments are closed.

Search

Subscribe

Subscribe to receive more outdoor adventures, and an in depth look at our local forests and waterways by Email.

If you do not receive a verification e-mail, check your spam folder.

Category

WFSU-FM Environmental Stories

  • Tallahassee’s latest urban reforestation effort brings new trees to Governor’s Park
  • Hurricane Ian’s estimated damage to Florida agriculture tops $1B
  • America’s largest underground springs gets even bigger with the discovery of another cave connection
  • DeSantis outlines second-term environmental plans
  • Deep freeze breaks pipes, creates water crisis across South

Twitter

Tweets by wfsuIGOR

iNaturalist

iNaturalist became a part of the WFSU Ecology Blog during the EcoCitizen Project in 2019.  Since then, we’ve used it to help identify the many plants and animals we see on our shoots.  And on the Backyard Blog, we show how it can be used to identify weeds and garden insects, to help figure out what’s beneficial or a possible pest.  Below is the iNaturalist profile belonging to WFSU Ecology producer Rob Diaz de Villegas.

iNaturalist


View robdv’s observations »

Most Recent

  • The Wakulla Springs Wildlife Survey- a decades long look
  • Welcome Liesel Hamilton to the WFSU Ecology Blog!
  • My Year in Bugs: the 2022 Backyard Blog
  • Timberlane Ravine: learn to love dead trees (and trillium!)
  • The strange and dangerous love lives of zebra longwing butterflies

Archives

January 2013
M T W T F S S
 123456
78910111213
14151617181920
21222324252627
28293031  
« Dec   Feb »

WFSU Ecology YouTube

  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Instagram
  • Flickr
  • Youtube

@2017 - PenciDesign. All Right Reserved. Designed and Developed by PenciDesign