Apalachicola Bay wild oyster harvest reopens- with limits

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On January 1st, for the first time in five years, oystermen harvested Apalachicola Bay. Lying unbothered during the moratorium, not only had oysters grown large, they’d grown beards. “Used to, they didn’t have hair on them,” says Roger Mathis. “They’d be as clean as they can be.”

Roger is culling oysters on his boat. Oysters grow on hard surfaces, usually other oysters. Their shells cement to each other and form reef structures, and oyster tongs tear sections of this structure off. On the boat, Roger knocks these chunks apart to separate the market-sized oysters from mussels and smaller oysters. He’s also contending with a grass-like vegetative “hair.”

Roger’s is one of five boats I see on Apalachicola Bay today. One reason there are so few is that Florida Fish and Wildlife has limited the number of licenses to harvest wild Apalachicola oysters. “It was 224 people applied, 151 people got them,” says Roger. “[An] FWC officer told me that a lot of them people didn’t even go pick up the packages.”

There are a limited number of people allowed on the bay, and by the time Regan McCarthy and I make it out on January 13, most of them have harvested their allotment. After the state of Florida gave the bay five years to recover from a fishery disaster, they’re easing back into wild harvests with a short season.

Getting back to work

The short season has also eased oystermen back into a highly specialized kind of work.

“My personal preference would have been that they left it closed for another five or so years to let the the populations become a little bit less vulnerable,” Says Dr. Sandra Brooke of the FSU Coastal and Marine Laboratory. “But I think from a cultural perspective, for Apalachicola and the communities there, I think it’s important for this fishery to reopen before so long has passed that they reach a point of no return. With that [point] being the oystermen have retired, the boats have gone away, they can’t get tongs anymore.”

This is already the case for many oystermen. Oyster tongs are made of wood. So are oyster boats. Roger explains that, as they’ve gone unused over the years, “they rotted down. I got a couple of them that rotted down. The motor’s tore up… But, nobody had tongs. Nobody had rigs; their trailers rusted down.”

Oystermen have also had to readjust to the physical demands of harvesting wild, subtidal oysters. They haul up hundreds of pounds of, essentially, rock, and then take the time to knock it apart with a culling iron. It’s a job Roger loves.

Oyster harvest seasons

“It’s what I’ve done for a living all my life, besides drive a truck,” Roger says. “It’s in your blood. It’s in your blood. That’s what you do, you know? I love it. Just as soon as my tags [are] up… I’m gonna have to go back to doing handyman work again until October.”

The current season ends on February 28. Every licensed oysterman was given a set number of harvest tickets; Roger received 31. Each ticket allows the harvest of one bag, which, per the FWC page on regulations, “is equal to two 5-gallon buckets, one 10-gallon bucket, or 60 pounds.”

Oystermen bring their tagged bags to an oyster house, which then sells 30 pound boxes to seafood markets and restaurants. Roger gets paid $1 per pound of culled oysters – $60 per 60 pound bag. Before they ran out, markets sold 30 pound boxes for $75. Apalachicola restaurants were selling a dozen raw, half shell oysters for $24.99. The further from Apalachicola, the higher the price.

The next season runs from October 1 through February 28, 2027. Sandra Brooke tells us that FWC will assess the oyster population over the summer, and allow the harvest of 10% of the market-sized oysters in the bay. The bay is closed between February and October, when oysters spawn.

The Oyster Plan

Every once in a while as Roger culls oysters, he holds ups a small rock. “Where they planted these rocks out here, that’s what we work. And you see that buoy right there? There’s one over there and right back over here. Anyway, this is the area we can work. This is Easthole.”

The harvest tickets correspond to one of four areas open for oyster harvest: Cat Point, Cat Point Spur, Peanut Ridge, and Easthole. These are some of the historically productive reefs in the bay, and also where restoration efforts were most successful.

Those restorations were guided by the Apalachicola Bay System Initiative (ABSI), a collective of seafood workers, researchers, state officials, and other stakeholders.

Roger Mathis was on ABSI board, and Sandra Brooke was ABSI’s Principal Investigator. During the moratorium, they worked to establish best practices for maintaining the fishery when it opened. The result is a set of recommendations known as “The Plan.” I wrote a synopsis of the plan in 2024.

The climatological conditions and water management issues that helped cause the fishery crash have not changed. The American southeast continues to experience long, severe droughts. Likewise, during these dry periods, the Army Corps of Engineers will continue to enact drought operations, and release a minimal amount of water into the Apalachicola River from the Woodruff Dam.

Less freshwater flow leads to higher salinity, triggering an explosion of oyster-eating snails such as oyster drills and crown conchs. While there is no immediate solution to droughts and low flows, Sandra believes there is one factor that can increase the bay’s resiliency.

Restoring the Bottom of Apalachicola Bay

“I think that a big part of the problem with the oyster populations was the lack of a good, stable substrate.” Sandra says. Substrate is the hard surface on which a larval oyster, known as spat, lands and grows. It is the foundation of a reef, and the reef is a habitat for oysters and other estuary animals.

“The thing about a drought is that it kills the oysters. Now, if the habitat is still intact, that means that when things can return to normal, when you get the next spawning event in spring or the fall or whenever it happens to be, that means there’s somewhere for those oysters to go. If there isn’t stable substrate that those oysters can land on, then there’s no real way to kick-start system again.”

The harsh droughts of 2011-12 came a year after the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. This closed fisheries in Texas and Louisiana, and increased demand for Florida’s most productive source of wild-caught oysters. The bay was heavily harvested at a time when less oysters were growing to adulthood and rebuilding reef structures.

In the years following 2012, the state’s efforts to restore the bottom failed.

Rocks or shells?

“They had used the traditional sort of fisheries management approach of reshelling,” Sandra says. “When you harvest oysters, you’re also harvesting their habitat. So as part of fisheries management, going back to Native American times, they would take those shells after they’ve been shucked and they’d put them back on the reef to replace what had been harvested.

“Well, when you have a very depleted habitat, that doesn’t really work very well. And so all the shell and fossil shell that were used for restoration just disappeared, buried, went away. Apalachicola is an extremely dynamic system, and it just went away.”

Sandra likens the bay to an “angry washing machine,” with circulating water washing away loose oyster shell.

During the moratorium, the FSU Coastal and Marine Lab tested different materials to see which would best stabilize the bay bottom. As we reported in 2024, large limestone rocks worked better at building reefs than small limestone rocks, oyster shells, or fossilized oyster shells. However, in the video, we see that Roger is holding up a small piece of limestone. It turns out that what works best ecologically isn’t necessarily what is best for the fishery.

Big rocks or little rocks?

When it comes to habitat building, the small limestone rocks didn’t measure up.

“The problem with the small limestone is that when you pile it up to make a reef… it sort of packs down really hard,” Sandra says. “And natural reefs have lots of nooks and crannies where the oyster larvae can go and hide from predators.

“So, I wanted something that would create a little structural complexity. There’s little nooks and crannies for things to hide in, and for all the other animals that live on a reef to colonize and create an ecosystem, not just a bunch of oysters growing on rocks that could be harvested. So you had to bring the ecosystem back in order to create a sustainable situation.”

The problem with large rocks is that they’re rough on oyster tongs.

When Sandra rode out to check the progress of large limestone reefs with oysterman Shannon Hartsfield, the oysters were healthy, but Shannon found that it was “hard to harvest,” Sandra says. “It’s hard to tong now. Shannon did it, but he wasn’t terribly happy about doing it. It was really difficult.”

A happy medium

The areas currently open to harvest were lined with the small limestone rock. Sandra estimates that of the 319 acres of small limestone placed in the bay, only about 50 acres have become productive. Seafood restaurants and markets report that the oysters harvested in these areas have been received enthusiastically. In the long term, though, thy bay may benefit from a mixed approach.

“If you think about it, there’s not a one size fits all for the restoration. You want to build an ecosystem, build a reef. But if you want to support a fishery, we maybe have to look at a different type of approach where you’re using harvestable materials and you have a re-cultching program that will take away the material that gets harvested every season.”

And while the larger limestone rocks are less harvest friendly, the habitat they create serves other commercially fished species. Stone crabs and blue crabs are predators that eat oyster consumers. The nooks and crannies Sandra mentions shelter other species before they reach maturity, species such as shrimp, red snapper, and red drum. Oyster reefs, salt marshes, and seagrass beds are nurseries for the majority of the seafood we eat from the northern Gulf.

“They grow like mad in Apalachicola”

I can see it on my face in the last shot of the video. After years of eating farm-raised oysters, I was surprised by the size of a wild-caught Apalachicola oyster.

“Wild-caught are going to be usually about three to five years old,” says Mark Babbey as he shucks oysters behind the bar at Hole in the Wall Seafood. “And farm-raised will be about eight months, maybe ten.”

Mark goes on to say that oystermen are required to throw back oysters less than three inches wide. Farmers can choose to sell their oysters at any size. Farmed oysters are not part of an ecosystem, where mature oysters reproduce and create future stock.

Also, while oysters take three to five years to reach market size in other estuaries, for years I’ve heard Apalachicola oystermen say that it takes half that time in the bay. Sandra Brooke agrees. Fed by an extensive network of tupelo/ cypress swamps, the Apalachicola River is a source of nutrient-rich sediments for its estuary.

“It’s an extremely productive system,” she says, “And oysters can grow to market size in 12 to 18 months. Just for context, up in New England, in that area, it takes three years to get to market size. So, they grow like mad in Apalachicola. Those big ones that were three inches big, they may have been two years old.”