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Go DeeperThe Nature Conservancy in Florida |
The zip tie clicks as Anne Birch, the director of The Nature Conservancy’s Indian River Lagoon restoration program in Florida, cinches another oyster shell to a plastic mesh mat. Birch had come to Crackerfest, a folk festival near the lagoon, to fish for volunteers to help create oyster-restoration mats—18-inch-square panels covered in shells that give young oysters a perfect place to grow.
Much like coral reefs, healthy oyster reefs shelter young sea life and protect the shoreline. But in recent years, oysters have been dying throughout the Indian River Lagoon as boat wakes in the shallow waters have dislodged oysters and heaped the shells into mounds. In parts of the lagoon, nearly 20 percent of the reefs have died back into piles of bleached shells.
Oyster mats have become a key component in the Conservancy’s plan to help restore this important 156-mile-long estuary. The pilot project to restore a 20-acre patchwork throughout the lagoon’s Canaveral National Seashore needed 3,000 mats—enough to cover an area the size of a large shopping mall. With each mat requiring an hour to piece together, the project needed help.
Birch hoped to attract 300 volunteers over two years. Instead, help poured in from a local chapter of the Red Hat Society, an antique car club and even the crew of a Royal Caribbean cruise ship. “I think the allure was that after an hour, people could hold that piece of the lagoon that they just helped restore,” says Linda Walters, the University of Central Florida biologist who developed the oyster-mat restoration technique.
With so much help on hand, the last mats are being placed in the lagoon, and Birch is looking for funding to restore another 20 acres. “Who knew,” says Birch, “that the charismatic megafauna of the lagoon was not sea turtles, manatees or dolphins, but the oyster.”
—Madeline Bodin
Nature picture credits (top to bottom, left to right): Photos © Anne Birch/TNC
