photo provided by George Halper The Florida Fishery Foundation recently delivered 1000 gallons of cured oyster shells to Hemp Key. The boat was provided by Four Winds Marina.

pleblanc@breezenewspapers.com

Florida Fishery Foundation President George Halper is on a mission to restore Hemp Key in Pine Island Sound with the utilization of oyster shells from local restaurants.

Among the restaurants they’ve utilized he said are the Lazy Flamingo, Miceli’s and the Lobster Lady in Cape Coral. Once collected, the shells are placed in a 50/50 solution of water and bleach for 24 hours and then aired out for a minimum of six months. This is done to keep invasive bacteria from infiltrating local waters, as he said, these oysters can come from other places such as Louisiana.

Hemp Key, Halper said, is the largest bird rookery in Pine Island Sound.

“That particular island is about 4 acres,” he said of Hemp Key. “We’re working with Dr. Eric Milbrandt and the Sanibel Captiva Conservation Foundation to restore the island.”

Halper said there are other organizations there to help as well, among them Florida Fish and Wildlife. Four Winds Marina has also donated use of its boats.

The project, he said, is no small feat and will take a good amount of time.

“You can use any type of shell you want that a substrate or the baby oysters, called spat, will attach to,” Halper said. “They do prefer oysters themselves. An oyster takes one year to become sexually mature and begins to release microscopic spat, or baby oysters that float on the current.” He went on to explain that while these spat have the ability to travel vertically, they cannot travel horizontally and are therefore drifted by the current and attach to a clean substrate. Each mature oyster has the ability to filter 50 gallons of water a day, Halper said.

“You can imagine the billions of gallons of water these oysters will be filtering a year from now.” Halper described the process in which an environment is created that can grow exponentially. “When the spat attach there may be 12 or 15 oysters attached to each of these substrate shells, so now you’ve got 15 oysters on one shell, then the next year you have 15 shells that are giving out baby spat for the following year,” Halper said. “What’s amazing is that each square meter or yard can contain up to 300 crabs. We have five species of very small crabs we’re probably not even aware of here in Pine Island Sound. Those crabs provide food for wading birds and redfish.”

The oysters, he said, additionally provide erosion protection as well as habitats for other types of fish, such as mangrove snapper, redfish, snook and trout.

“They also provide a protective barrier for mangroves,” said Halper, adding that there are several different kinds of mangroves that will attach to oysters. “The ones you see in the water are the red mangroves,” said Halper, “and they demand a high salinity. We’re trying to bring this back, and the biggest problem we have here is fresh water intrusion.”

In the future, the foundation will begin something he refers to as a “grow out facility,”he added.

According to Halper the state of Florida lacks a saltwater fish hatchery.

“We have 1,400 miles of coastline and we don’t have a fish hatchery for saltwater species,” he said.

Until the funds are available to build the grow out facility, Halper’s focus will be on habitat and oyster restoration. He said a fish hatchery would likely cost between $25 to $40 million, which would improve tourism and create jobs.

Red tides, kill everything, he said.. This has greatly affected snook, redfish and spotted sea trout. “What happens is the redfish and the snook, once sexually mature, move near shore/off shore to breed,” said Halper. “If red tide comes and someone takes the brute stock, it takes many, many years for these immature fish to catch up. So our redfish leave Pine Island Sound, which is an estuary, when they become sexually mature and they go up to the Gulf and that’s where they stay.

“If you kill the brute stock with red tide, there’s no reproduction,” he continued. “So when people say let’s reopen the fishery and start harvesting the snook and redfish again, you’re taking fish, just on the cusp of going out and being brute stock and replenishing our area — that are pre-adolescent, and people don’t realize this.”

For now, habitat restoration primarily with oysters in the water remains the focus, Halper said. Soon the foundation will be going into schools to demonstrate to the students how they can make portable oyster habitats themselves, which, he said, requires no permit.

“There are things people can do to create structured habitats that clean the water at the same time, and we can show them how to build them.”

Being a former teacher, Halper admits he is very interested in doing this for the next generation. “We are 100 percent volunteers,” he said, “no one takes a penny or ever will. Everything goes directly back to what we do.”