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This past winter we had a bucket loader that dumped about 52 acres worth of limestone rip
rap on the bottom here in Pamlico sound to serve as settlement substrate for oyster larvae.
So what we did was we went out, these pieces of rip rap have been piled up into mounds
that are sort of placed checkerboard fashion on the sea floor. And so we have randomly
picked some of these mounds to sample. And the way we sample for oysters is to after
we have randomly picked the mounds we place a quadrant on the mounds and then divers excavate
those pieces if limestone rip rap We put them in mesh bags, bring them up on the boat and
then we put them on what we call a culling table where we spread them back out in the
quadrant and then we start counting and measuring the oysters that have settled on those pieces
of rip rap And we are seeing just incredibly high numbers that probably settled in June
of this year.
Oyster populations are at a historic lows compared to a hundred years ago. So they are
a commercially important species. Served as the backbone of the seafood industry in North
Carolina several centuries ago and serve as critical habitat for fish and crabs and also
filter tremendous amount of water. So they serve a lot of different functions. So creating
these reefs we are hoping that they will not only perpetuate the reef here but then the
larvae that are spawned from this reef will be dispersed to other areas that are actually
open to fishing. This particular area is not open to fishing.
Well there is a tremendous amount of oyster settlement as I just mentioned, but also a
tremendous amount of fish. So we are seeing some sheepshead swimming around down there
that are recreationally important fish in this size range. A lot of spot, a lot of croaker,
flat fish swimming around. So within very short order, within a matter of three months
these reefs are being utilized by fish.