HILLSBOROUGH COUNTY, Fla. — The Tampa Bay Watch environmental organization is giving new life to oyster shells tossed in the trash at local restaurants to create more habitats and filtration in Tampa Bay.
“We wanted to get that oyster shell back in the water by taking them out of the garbage out of our landfills from our local restaurants and seafood establishments, we're taking out of the landfills, and we're putting it back in the water to serve as that habitat as those homes for more oysters to grow in the bay,” explained Richard Radigan, the Oyster Shell Program Manager with Tampa Bay Watch.
It’s part of the organization’s Community Oyster Reef Enhancement Program (CORE). They collect roughly 9,000 pounds of oyster shells from seven partner restaurants every week to create these vertical oyster gardens.
These gardens are “recycled shells that have been drilled and put on a rope, and we're going to hang that off of the dock in the water column, and what that will do is that will serve as substrate or a home for juvenile or baby oysters to settle on and grow,” Radigan explained.
The bigger mission is to restore the Tampa Bay estuary, as oysters play a crucial role in underwater ecology, from fish habitats to filtration.
“An adult oyster, while suspended, can filter up to two gallons of water an hour or roughly 50 gallons of water a day. So as you can imagine, expanding our oyster populations will have an exponential positive effect on our water quality,” Radigan said.
This is just one of many recent projects to restore the reefs in Tampa Bay.
In June, the Florida Department of Transportation installed nearly a thousand ‘wave attenuation devices’ off the Sunshine Skyway Bridge to stop shoreline erosion and create a natural barrier reef.
“They provide nursery habitats for a lot of marine life, the Florida manatee, snook, sea bass,” explained FDOT Coordinator Nicole Monies.
In May, ABC Action News reported on the Tampa Bay Watch partnership with Tampa Bay Water to repurpose old, leaky toilets into homes for oysters.
“The oysters barnacles, your fouling organisms will attach to these reef balls and do that biological filtration, that's so important,” said Eric Plage, Oyster Reef ball program coordinator.
This week, 50 oyster gardens start their new lives off the dock a the Grand Hyatt in Tampa.
