Richard Bosarge began harvesting Mississippi oysters on his boat, the Royster, in 2007. He and other oystermen pivoted to other types of fishing when the state’s public reefs closed in 2019. (Illan Ireland/Mississippi Free Press)
PASS CHRISTIAN, Miss. – On a mid-November morning, a stately white fishing boat named the Royster peeled away from the harbor and motored toward a reef less than two miles offshore. The 42-foot vessel was equipped with a triangular oyster dredge made of rope and metal—a common tool for scraping the shellfish off the surface of the reefs on which they grow.
Over the next four hours, Capt. Richard Bosarge and his three-man crew used the dredge to retrieve oysters from the seabed and haul them back onto the boat for sorting. Muffled radio tunes mingled with the sound of clanging metal as crew members broke up oyster clusters using hatchets.
Bosarge could hardly contain his excitement. For the first time in five years, he and his crew were harvesting wild oysters in Mississippi waters.
“We never thought we’d get to do this again on our reefs,” said Bosarge, a Mississippi native who began harvesting oysters on the Royster in 2007. “It was just something that we didn’t think would ever come back.”
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While Mississippi’s oyster catch has fluctuated for decades, the local industry was formidable at the turn of the 21st century. Between 1996 and 2003, Mississippi reported capturing over 2 million pounds of oysters during the annual harvesting season, which stretched from October through April. Those harvests were valued at as much as $7 million in a single year, according to data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
But over the past two decades, a series of natural and human-made disasters have decimated Mississippi’s oyster population, hobbling restaurant and tourist economies along the coast. The state had not held a harvest on its public reefs since 2018.
Then, in late October, the Mississippi Department of Marine Resources announced that the reefs would reopen for a limited harvest beginning Nov. 13. The 10-day season would return Mississippi oysters to local and regional markets without jeopardizing the state’s still-vulnerable reefs, agency leaders said. It would also provide a boost to local fishermen and seafood distributors. The agency has since added 10 more harvesting days starting in December.
MDMR acknowledges that it will take much more than two 10-day harvests to revive the local oyster industry, which contributed more than $23 million in sales and over 560 full- and part-time jobs to the state as late as 2009. The agency has spent years trying to bring back the reefs along the Gulf Coast, working with university scientists and other partners on a range of restoration projects. Those efforts have yielded mixed results, and many longtime oystermen have pivoted to other types of fishing since the reefs closed in 2019.
To some industry veterans like Bosarge, however, the prospect of turning even a small profit during the current harvest feels worth it.
“We’re … just so ecstatic to be going through the motions and capturing oysters,” he said aboard the Royster on Nov. 16. “We could be shrimping right now, but we just had to give this a try. It’s been so long.”
Decades of decline
Once a major oystering hub on the Mississippi coast, Pass Christian’s harbor has been quiet the past five winters. The absence of a harvest since 2018 has had ripple effects across town, affecting restaurants and tourism as well as seafood sales.
Mayor Jimmy Rafferty says there was a time when over 100,000 sacks of oysters would pass through his city during oyster season.
“At one point, oysters were synonymous with Pass Christian, Mississippi,” he explained. “We had oyster festivals and things like that. We don’t have that anymore.”
The trouble for Mississippi oysters began in 2005, when Hurricane Katrina barreled across the Gulf of Mexico and slammed into the Mississippi coast, damaging or destroying 90% of the state’s public reefs. Five years later, a colossal oil spill from the BP-owned Deepwater Horizon drilling rig wiped out as many as 8.3 billion oysters across the Gulf coast.
Scientists speculate, however, that Mississippi oysters might have bounced back from these disasters were it not for the 2019 Bonnet Carré Spillway openings in neighboring Louisiana. Historic rains had swollen the Mississippi River and the spillway functioned as a release valve, helping to prevent flooding in New Orleans and other communities. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers left the spillway open for 123 total days, sending river water into Lake Pontchartrain and the Mississippi Sound.
The influx of freshwater from the river dramatically reduced salinity levels in the estuary, killing nearly all the oysters in the western Sound and prompting MDMR to close the state’s reefs for the next five years.
“There were very few oysters left after the 2019 openings,” said Jessica Pruett, a postdoctoral research associate at the University of Southern Mississippi who studies the state’s oyster population. “To have that many repeated events that cause a population to have so many deaths—it’s really hard to come back from that.”
Pruett added that Louisiana oysters did not suffer the same kind of damage from the spillway openings because most of its reefs are located west of the “area of influence.” The state has continued to hold regular harvesting seasons since 2019.
Data from NOAA highlights the decline of Mississippi’s oyster industry even before the spillway openings. In 2008, the state reported bringing more than 2.6 million pounds of oysters to shore, a catch worth about $6.9 million. A decade later—the last year for which harvesting data is available—that total had fallen to 31,832 pounds, valued at $183,365.
During this year’s limited oyster season, MDMR has capped daily harvesting totals at 10 sacks per commercial vessel, hoping to prevent over-fishing on state reefs and spur future population growth. Each sack contains roughly 200 oysters and weighs 100 to 120 pounds.
MDMR’s strict limits may have deterred some fishermen from participating in the current harvest, Bosarge said. He plans to sell the sacks he fills aboard the Royster directly to the public for $80 each and split the proceeds among his crew.
“We’re trying to make it work,” he said. “If we can retail them, everybody can make a decent [wage].”
Glimmers of hope
The return of oyster season in Mississippi may have caught fishermen by surprise, but officials tasked with managing the state’s reefs have reported signs of progress leading up to the current harvest. During reef assessments conducted each fall, MDMR observed growing numbers of oyster larvae attached to adult oyster shells, agency leaders said. It takes these attached larvae, known as spat, one to three years to mature into adult oysters under the right conditions, making them key predictors of growth.
“We’ve seen some significant improvements over the last several years with some really good natural spat sets,” MDMR Chief Scientific Officer Rick Burris said. “So after looking at the data … we felt like a limited season—like we’re going to have—would be sustainable for the reefs and also a benefit to the industry.”
Since Hurricane Katrina, tens of millions of dollars of state, federal and BP oil spill settlement money have been poured into revitalizing Mississippi’s oyster reefs. Working with local universities and other organizations, the state has lined key areas of the Sound with limestone, shells and other materials, aiming to provide hard surfaces for baby oysters to settle on. It has also experimented with various aquaculture projects, filling cages with baby oysters and suspending them above the seafloor until they reach maturity.
Although many of these efforts failed to deliver meaningful results in past years, the state’s array of restoration strategies—coupled with drier conditions that kept freshwater out of the Sound for the past two years—appear to have laid the groundwork for future population growth, local scientists said.
“We’ve seen data of a lot more recruitment,” said Pruett, referring to the process in which baby oysters grow into an existing population. “Obviously, there’s adult oysters somewhere [in the Sound] that are producing larvae that are settling on the reef. So that is hopeful.”
Burris emphasized that more work must be done to rejuvenate Mississippi’s oyster industry. His agency is leasing acres of state-owned reefs to private parties,hoping to improve upkeep and harvesting numbers by allowing fishermen to manage their own oyster grounds. The approach follows the same management model as Louisiana, where oyster reefs have been leased out to people and businesses since the 1800s.
“Getting the private industry involved … will allow each individual entity to be able to go in and plant their own acreage and harvest sustainably,” Burris said. “We think it’ll be good for the population as well as the seafood industry.”
Bosarge thinks the state should continue to moderate oyster harvesting along Mississippi’s Gulf Coast until the reefs have fully recovered. Though he was encouraged by the size of the oysters captured aboard the Royster, he believes limiting the catch this season is the best way to ensure there will be a longer, more profitable harvest next year.
“It’s simple math,” he said. “You can’t take off more than what the reef can produce.”
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This story is a product of the Mississippi River Basin Ag & Water Desk, an independent reporting network based at the University of Missouri. Support our independent reporting network with a donation.