EasternOyster_RebuildingReefs_Pollack_Jennifer_CorpusChristiTX_8February2022_Reel4095.mp3

Jennifer Pollack [00:00:00] Yes, I think this is such an important part of what we try to do here at the Harte Research Institute, and in my lab specifically, is to, to teach people about the importance of the coastal environment and the resources that it provides.

Jennifer Pollack [00:00:19] So a lot of the work that we do is related to habitat restoration, to rebuilding oyster reefs where they've been lost, and to studying, you know, how well they do at replacing the lost benefits that we know used to be present before reefs were degraded.

Jennifer Pollack [00:00:38] But a lot of oyster reef restoration work is placing large amounts of material into specific places on the bay bottom, and that usually involves dredges and drag lines and cranes and putting this material, you know, scooping it off of a barge and placing it on the bay bottom.

Jennifer Pollack [00:00:57] And so unless you happen to be out there on the day that the reef is being reconstructed, or that material's being put on the bay bottom, or the couple of weeks when that's happening, you don't really know that it's happening.

Jennifer Pollack [00:01:10] You know, the oyster reefs that we're restoring are under the water 100 percent of the time. The tide doesn't go out and you can't view where these reefs are. So it's, unless you saw it being built, you wouldn't know it's there.

Jennifer Pollack [00:01:24] So what we've done is we've extended these efforts to the community through these public, volunteer-based oyster reef restoration events that we've been hosting since 2009, I believe, was our first one, in partnership with Goose Island State Park.

Jennifer Pollack [00:01:44] And what we do there is we take some of those recycled oyster shells that we've reclaimed from restaurants and seafood wholesalers and festivals, and we bring them out to Goose Island State Park. You know, we have a truck of them brought to us from our stockpile at the port, and we bag up those oyster shells into mesh bags to essentially hold them in place.

Jennifer Pollack [00:02:06] And we take those bags of shell, we carry them down to the, the water's edge, and we sort of set them there to kind of mobilize our efforts. And we have groups that are bagging up oyster shells for maybe an hour, you know, scooping the shells with shovels, working with a partner, filling these mesh bags.

Jennifer Pollack [00:02:26] After we have a certain number of bags filled and, I mean, people can fill a thousand bags in an hour or so, then we, we work with that group of volunteers who's there and we carry those bags of oyster shells out into the, out into the water to a place that we've kind of pre-staked out.

Jennifer Pollack [00:02:44] And we rebuild an area of oyster reef, sort of bag by bag, kind of brick by brick, almost like you would kind of build a wall, where we place that shell material and the mesh bags back on the bay bottom. And we replace those, those necessary attachment places for the larval oysters to recruit and attach and survive and grow.

Jennifer Pollack [00:03:10] And so, on one hand, you have these large-scale reef rebuilding efforts with the barges, where you can create acres and acres and acres, I mean, you know, tens of acres of habitat.

Jennifer Pollack [00:03:23] And on the other end of the scale, you have these very small community-based efforts where people are rebuilding a reef, you know, literally shovelful by shovelful of shell into mesh bags and placing those out in the bay. They're much smaller, but we find them to be very, very important because of the way that they connect people to the water in their backyard where they live.