dhsnke
Senior Member
I was in Panama city last week and the news said Apalachicola closed all harvesting of oysters until 2025.
Sorry to hear that. Hopefully they will see some improvement, but I wouldn't hold my breath. It doesn't sound like an over fishing problem but a water quality problem. We have had a similar water quality issue in the Indian River lagoon in E Cent FL and a total collapse of the clam fishery here 20 years ago.
Unfortunately, if there is an improvement in five years, there may be very few that still have licenses to harvest, as RS endorsements require a certain $ amount or percentage of income come from seafood sales to qualify for renewal. Its a Catch 22, as unless the local fisherman can find an alternate fishery in the interim, many will be out with no way to re-enter the fishery by then
Seems there would be hope but not sure if water quality level requirements are the same for spat to take in the wild versus that for spawned stock to simply survive to maturity after being planted. They have great success growing aquaculture clams in Cedar Key but that area never had large self sustaining wild clam fishery. In our Indian River lagoon the shellfish leases were abandoned shortly after the collapse.It isn't a water quality issue. There are farmed, aqua-culture oyster beds that are thriving in the area.
There has been 5 times that the flow out of woodruff dam has increased the salinity in Apalachicola bay, 3 times the flow was low enough in 2010 during the drought which was counteracted by increased flow from rain fall during the months in between, the other 2 times were one month intervals in 13 and 16 and the flow still met minimum requirements for the bay with greatly increased flow the next month due to rainfall. Florida has lost the water war and can't blame agriculture since the reduced flow events doesn't coincide with ag water withdrawals. The fwc is partly to blame and the oyster men are the other party to blame after the stripping of the bay during the deep water horizon incident. The fwc should have closed the bay then and didn't, just like how they ignored the warnell study that showed that the bay is actually getting too much freshwater influx. Trying to drain the Tate's Forest into the bay again isn't going to fix the issues.
Good ol' days=gone
Last time I took the wife to Rick's on the River in Tampa for oysters, they were serving Texas oysters.
And that opens the door to developers.In Florida, agriculture gets blamed for everything negative related to the environment.