| "Ninety to ninety-five percent of the market-size oysters were gone" | |
| Bradley Randall, Mississippi Department of Marine Resources |
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Oyster harvesting season in Mississippi was to begin a week after Hurricane Katrina devastated the Gulf Coast region. In addition to the destruction of boats, marinas, harbor facilities, and processing plants, the storm severely damaged and changed the resources. In response, the state’s coastal resource managers developed a program that provided financial assistance to oyster harvesters and collected valuable data.
After Hurricane Katrina struck on August 29, 2005, "there were oysters out on Highway 90," recalls Eddie Rhodes, a Mississippi commercial fisherman. "We got 25 feet of water through here. It was like a set of rapids."
"Ninety to ninety-five percent of the market-size oysters were gone," says Bradley Randall, biological program coordinator for the Mississippi Department of Marine Resources (DMR) Shellfish Bureau. "There was no way to have a season," which was to run September to April.
It was two weeks after the storm before Randall and other Shellfish Bureau staff members could borrow a boat and find the gasoline to even do a preliminary assessment of the resources. "Everything had changed. There were reefs that had been very productive that were just no longer there," he says.
With 10,000 acres of resources to assess and fishermen whose livelihoods—and often homes and belongings—had been lost, DMR created a program to pay Mississippi oyster harvesters to assist with mapping and assessing the oyster reefs.
For 25 days beginning in October 2005, 75 boats with 150 captains and deckhands who heard about the program by word of mouth used cane poles to assess the bottom type of each reef as a live oyster bottom (thick), scattered live oysters, shells/shell hash, firm mud, buried shells/oysters, sand, or too deep/unknown.
"Each day, they were assigned six one-nautical-mile transects that they had to complete," Randall explains. "Each data point was 120 feet. They would go out with a GPS [Global Positioning System] and go in a straight line to predetermined latitude and longitude marks and take the cane pole and feel the bottom."
The Shellfish Bureau is still processing the data, but the information gathered helped determine sites for a follow-up project in November and December 2006, where commercial oyster harvesters helped relay oysters to replace reef material lost during the hurricane from Biloxi Bay and Graveline Bayou to oyster reefs in the western Mississippi Sound.
In addition to the Shellfish Bureau collecting valuable data and oyster harvesters getting put to work, Randall says the program also improved communication between the regulators and fishermen.
"I would stress that this also gave the fishermen an idea of how much damage was done," he says. "Otherwise, it just would have been our word. This way they got to get out and see what damage was done to the reefs with their own eyes."
He adds, "This has brought fishermen and the state together on the same page. We’re working together to solve the problems we have."
For more information on Mississippi’s oyster mapping and assessment project, contact Bradley Randall at (228) 523-4085, or Bradley.Randall@dmr.ms.gov.
