Some local Scouts are getting their feet wet in coastal Georgia’s oyster habitat.
With help from several other scouts and the state Department of Natural Resources, Euan Berryman is putting together oyster habitats that soon will find new homes in the waters off coastal Georgia. His project is part of the Boy Scouts of America’s Earth-Tribe program.
“A lot of the oyster habitats have been disappearing,” Berryman said, “so that’s why I chose this project.”
Living in a coastal county such as Liberty also had a lot to do with why he chose this project, Berryman acknowledged.
“I did a lot of research,” he said.
So Berryman enlisted the help of other Scouts — and got oyster shells from O.D.’s Crab House — to put together the oyster reefs. They also are working alongside Cameron Brinton, a marine biologist with the Georgia Department of Natural Resources’ Coastal Resources Division.
The oyster population, for now, is stable. The habitat has rebounded from overfishing and poor habitat management that led to a sudden and drastic decline 80-100 years ago.
“At the start of the 1900s, we were leading the nation in oyster production,” Brinton said. “Since then, some estimates put us at losing about 90% of our oysters.”
Oysters in the larval stage float around for a couple of weeks. Then they look for some sort of hard substrate to attach to and they spend the rest of their lives in that location, Brinton noted.
“Typically, that’s another oyster shell,” he said. “Historically, we were doing a lot of pulling oyster shell out but not putting oyster shell back in. So even if oysters had been able to reproduce fast enough to replace harvest, they were lacking that hard substrate they needed.”
Oysters also are considered to be crucial for the health of an estuarine ecosystem — according to the University of Georgia’s Marine Extension and Georgia Sea Grant, oysters are “ecosystem engineers” as they provide essential fish habitat and help reduce pollutants in the water through filtration.
One oyster can filter as much as 30 quarts of water a day.
Aside from being a food source for humans, oysters provide other benefits, Brinton added, even if not everyone is a fan of their taste.
“They stabilize banks and they provide habitat for almost every important recreational and commercial fish we have in Georgia,” he said.
Many fish species spend their young lives inshore and use oyster reefs as habitat and shelter, Brinton said. For example, red drum uses oyster reefs throughout their entire life cycle and grouper have been found as larval fish over the tops of oyster reefs.
In building their reefs, the Scouts assemble wire over wooden slats and there are oyster shells inside wire cages.
“We’re cutting to size and trimming off the sharp edges,” Berryman said. “We’re using stapler guns to staple them together and filling it up with oyster shells.”
“Modules like we’re building today are fairly tedious and labor intensive, so many hands make light work,” Brinton added. “It really helps boost the amount of area we can cover. It’s harder to get people out on the water to do that side of things because we’re limited on boat space.”
Berryman, son of Winn Army Community Hospital commander Col. Margaret Berryman, has been in the Scouts for three years. His project is part of the Scouts’ Earth Tribe initiative on the environment and sustainability.
Brinton said the target date to put out the oyster cages is at the end of the month. They are waiting on a permit from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. That date is picked to catch the oysters at their peak of spawning. The oyster spawning season lasts six months begins in April and May.
“We have to be careful what time of year we put them out,” he said.
The goal is to put about 50 of them out on Teakettle Creek in McIntosh County.
