In a move with little to no precedent, Alabama conservation officials have told oyster fisherman there won’t be an oyster season in the year ahead, because there just don’t seem to be enough oysters in state waters to justify one.
Blanket closures in the past have been driven by disasters such as hurricanes and the Deepwater Horizon oil disaster. Scott Bannon, director of the Marine Resources Division of the Alabama Department of Conservation and Natural Resources, said this apparently is the first time a closure has been driven by a dearth of oysters.
The news was received with resignation by a small group of seafood harvesters and dealers who turned out for a meeting in Coden. For them, the loss of a single year was far overshadowed by concern about an apparent collapse of the region's oyster ecology and what might be done to reverse it.
"Let's keep it closed this season," Bannon told a group of about a dozen listeners. "I don't think there's anything there for you."
"In other words, you're telling me to go fishing," said Ted Gillespie, one of the most outspoken oyster harvesters present. The remark drew laughter, but it wasn't especially cheerful.
Unless the recommendation made this week is later modified, it means wild oysters won't be harvested from state waters until at least next fall, when a 2019-2020 season will be considered. It doesn't affect private oyster-farming operations.
After the meeting, Bannon said the low turnout was significant. "Unfortunately, the number of people who showed up … they knew it was coming," he said.
Alabama wild oyster harvests have been abysmal for years, Bannon said. A seven-day season last year produced a harvest of just 136 sacks recorded by the state -- a far decline from more than 7,000 sacks in 2013, which itself was far below historic levels.
In 2017, Department of Conservation exploratory dives found 249 three-inch oysters per acre in Heron Bay. Jason Herrmann, a Marine Resources biologist, said this year's dives had produced even worse findings, a calculation of 112 three-inch oysters per acre.
Herrmann said the results of this year's exploratory dives were abysmal, and his numbers were greeted with dismay. He said that 23 dives in waters south of Bayou La Batre had counted oysters in 250 samples of 1 square yard each. The dives had turned up a grand total of five three-inch oysters, 216 small oysters, 2,138 spat (juvenile oysters that have attached to the spots where they will spend their lives) and 80 oyster drills, a predatory mollusk that bores through oysters' shells to eat them.
Conditions can vary from reef to reef within the region, so those dives don’t necessarily represent a comprehensive regional picture. But Herrmann and Bannon said they were seeing terrible conditions everywhere. There were oysters, they said, but not enough to reward an effort to harvest them.
Some of that may be due to cyclical factors. Herrmann said 2017 had brought extended periods of low oxygen and low salinity in coastal waters, making last year a disastrous one for spat. A spat wipeout in one year means few growing oysters in the next. Herrmann did say that spat production seems better this year, providing some cause for hope.
The bigger concern, both for the conservation officials and the "oyster community" served by the meeting, is that this latest downturn doesn't just reflect a bad year or two. Both sides fear this may now be the norm for Mobile Bay and nearby waters, a long-term change that will be hard to reverse.
Among the oyster harvesters, theories abound about the dominant factor in the decline. Some point the finger at development along the rivers that feed the bay, some at agricultural runoff, some at the disposal of dredge spoil for Corps of Engineers work on the Mobile Ship Channel.
"To me it's a culmination of a lot of things that happened," said Bayou La Batre Mayor Terry Downey.
Bannon agrees with that and says some of those factors are outside his department's power to affect. They've taken decades to accumulate, he said.
"And now we're trying to find a way out," he said. "We can't change all that."
Much of the discussion at Wednesday's session involved two views of how to handle the poor forecast. Some harvesters, like Gillespie, wanted a season so that they could go "scratch around" and see if they could find anything. Bannon said that in his opinion, that approach had been tested last year and had failed.
"I didn't have time to look around," Gillespie complained about the seven-day window.
"I'm going to disagree with you," Bannon said "What you guys showed us … there are not any oysters."
"What I hope happens is you go out there and prove me wrong," he said of last year's season, and that didn't happen.
Oyster harvesters have decades and in some cases generations of hands-on engagement and observation. Conservation officials favor a scientific approach that tries to single out what factors are having he most effect in a complex environment. The two groups don't always see eye to eye but seemed Wednesday to share at least one major worry: That approaches that have worked in the past, such as putting out beds of shell for spat to settle on, no longer seem to be bearing fruit.
"It's tragic, to be honest," said Bannon. He and Herrmann said that researchers and conservation officials are still trying new things. One approach, called "remote setting," seeds spat on bundles of shell in a hatchery, letting them take hold before the bundles are placed in open water. There's also a line of thought that creating raised beds would get oysters out of the low-oxygen zones that can be worst along the bottom.
But Herrmann said those are small-scale experiments in their early stages. Even if successful, they'll take time and money to ramp up.
Another pervasive worry was the number of active oyster harvesters has dwindled away, and few if any young people are involved. Gillespie, whose specialty is working deep-water channels in the Cedar Point area, said he and the others in the room might be the last few of a dwindling breed.
For now, he said, the lack of an oyster season definitely won't mean time off. He wasn't kidding with his joke about going fishing.
"I’m a multi-season man," he said, referring to seasons for oysters, fish, crabs and shrimp. "You live by the season. I'm fortunate enough to know how to do all of them."
Gillespie, now 60, started oystering when he was 20. Seeing the writing on the wall is nothing new for him. In a 2002 Press-Register story about tough times in the seafood business, he said that Mobile Bay shrimpers and oystermen were both endangered species.
"We're a dying breed like the shrimpers, too," he said in that interview. "We'll see who goes out first."
Now, in 2018, the answer seems all too clear.
"I'm going to have to figure out some kind of fish to catch this winter," he said.
Maybe the closure will allow for nature to rebound. While Bannon thinks it's the right call, he said, it's not one he ever wanted to make.
“it’s not an answer I like,” he said.