Pearl on the Georgia Coast

By Leigh Beeson Photos by Peter Frey Originally published by University of Georgia

It was a pretty summer day on the Georgia coast. Sunny, with just enough cloud cover that it wasn’t yet stiflingly hot. But the waters were rougher than expected, tossing the researchers around in the skiff like rag dolls.

They’re heading to Romerly Marsh Creek, a site about five miles off the University of Georgia’s Skidaway Island campus and a couple dozen miles southeast of Savannah.

Once the tide recedes, they hop out of the boat—and instantly sink knee deep in the muck. They expected this. But the feeling of mud oozing into work boots or beat-up old sneakers is a sensation that just can’t be described in words. It’s something you have to feel.

But for Tom Bliss, the director of UGA’s Shellfish Research Laboratory, it’s just another Thursday.

Bliss joined Marine Extension and Georgia Sea Grant in 2006, after working on numerous fisheries and wildlife management research projects on the west coast and completing a master’s degree on ring-necked pheasants in Austria.

These days he focuses on something else entirely: oysters. More specifically, Georgia oysters and how to revitalize the state’s oncethriving industry.

Native Americans began harvesting and eating oysters thousands of years ago. The marketing and sales of oysters in the British colonies dates back to around the 1600s. The state of Georgia didn’t catch on to the industry until nearly 300 years later.

“Fishermen overharvested the areas up North,” Bliss says. “You can track how oystering marched down the East Coast as they overharvested all the way down.”

Eventually, Georgia became the prime spot for oyster harvests in the early 1900s. At its heyday, the state harvested 8 million pounds of oyster meat each year.

But by the 1930s, overharvesting and environmental degradation had taken its toll on Georgia waters. And the decreased demand for oysters, coupled with increased labor costs, hit the coast hard.

The canneries that relied so heavily on Georgia’s shellfish shuttered. The shucking houses up and down the state’s coast followed. An entire fishing culture collapsed.

But all hope wasn’t lost.

Enough of the ecosystem remained intact to support the small population of oysters that survived.

“Georgia is lucky because we have so many twists and turns and deep estuaries in our waterways that although they overfished areas, they didn’t get to all of it,” Bliss says.

Another geographic feature, Georgia’s warmer waters, helped the under-the-radar oyster population bounce back more quickly than it would in the Northeast.

“After the ’60s when harvests pretty much stopped, oysters were

Bliss and Pelli place bags of oyster shells at a reef research site in Chatham County.

able to rebound, and now this area is one of the healthiest wild populations,” Bliss says. “We got saved by biology.”

Bliss and John Pelli, an aquaculture extension agent based at UGA’s Skidaway campus, drag bags upon bags of oyster shells from the boat onto the edge of the creek. Right now, the bagged shell look a bit out of place, but once the tide rolls in, the bags will be submerged by a couple of feet of water.

As the summer progresses, wild oysters will release their offspring in larval form. The baby oysters then find a place to settle, permanently attaching themselves to a hard surface. Frequently, they cling to older oyster shells, which creates the giant, tight clumps of oysters that characterize the Georgia coast.

The shells Bliss and Pelli are tossing into the shallow waters are part of a larger project between the university and the Georgia Department of Natural Resources to determine the best means of rebuilding these natural living shorelines.

The oysters are pretty good at rebuilding on their own. But the researchers are hoping to help give them a head start by providing the perfect place for larva to cement themselves.

As the baby oysters grow, they’ll form large clumps that are difficult to pry apart with your bare hands.

Over time, the oysters build reefs that protect Georgia’s salt marsh estuaries from adverse weather and tides, buffering wave energy and guarding against erosion. They also provide an enticing habitat for fish, clams, and crabs. Because of the variety of aquatic life, fishermen are drawn to the reefs as well.

The reefs also improve water quality. But over the years, the reefs were degraded and sometimes even removed entirely, leaving the shoreline vulnerable.

The researchers will venture out again in a few weeks with more shells. But those will already have baby oysters, or spat, attached to the shells. In theory, putting spat on shells could jumpstart the reef formation process. If it works, coastal counties would no longer be limited to restoring reefs during the shellfish’s narrow summer spawning season.

While wild oysters may help rebuild Georgia’s reefs, they have limited appeal for consumers.

“Our wild oysters that grow out there are good for the shucking market, an oyster roast, or canning,” says Mark Risse, director of Marine Extension and Georgia Sea Grant and Georgia Power Professor of Water Policy. “There isn’t much consumer preference for them because they’re long, skinny shells with sharp edges. If you went to a grocery store or restaurant and asked for a dozen oysters, you wouldn’t want them to give you one big clump of oysters.”

Still, Justin Manley, a commercial fisherman with aquaculture research experience, saw an opportunity to sell locally farmed oysters to Savannah restaurants. He founded Spat King Oysters in 2011 and went to work trying to raise Georgia oysters in a more aesthetically pleasing way.

Of course, there was a catch.

At the time, Georgia didn’t allow spat to be imported from other states, so Manley had to produce his own seed in order to farm, something that took considerable time and effort.

So Manley put PVC pipes out in the marshes, where they’d be covered in spat during spawning season. He brought the sticks back in, removed the spat, sorted them by size, and maintained them in a homemade nursery. Growing the oysters made it possible to tailor the shapes of the oyster shells to make them resemble the famous oysters served on the half shell in so many high-end restaurants.

Spat King was a successful, if short-lived, venture. After four years, the state’s first oyster farmer wanted out.

“You know how you have to work all the bugs out of a vehicle before the next person buys it?” says Manley, who is now pursuing a doctoral degree in marine sciences from the Franklin College of Arts and Sciences.

“I was the first edition, and there were plenty of bugs.”

But those bugs got Manley talking with other industry folks and with university researchers about how the university could support this burgeoning industry’s need for oyster spat.

Those conversations led to the creation of the state’s first oyster hatchery at UGA’s Skidaway Island campus. It also led to a gig for Manley to get back in the business of baby oysters as the hatchery’s manager.

Manley in the Shellfish Research Lab's hatchery. Oyster seed on a sorting screen.

Founded in 2015, the Shellfish Research Laboratory’s hatchery is a collaborative effort that includes Marine Extension and Georgia Sea Grant, the Georgia Department of Natural Resources, and the Georgia Shellfish Growers Association. The hatchery produces between 5 and 7 million spat per year, with a potential future value of more than $1 million in annual sales on the half shell market.

It’s a good start for the relatively small operation, but the dream is to restore a thriving Georgia oyster industry—one that can sustain itself and make the commercial arm of UGA’s hatchery obsolete.

Bliss would like to see more fishermen get into the oyster farming game as a counterbalance to their current operations as well, whether they’re catching fish or clamming. Farming oysters on the side could help them withstand the kind of market swings that see clams drop to as low as 10 cents apiece.

“If you haven’t planned for that, it has wiped people out,” Bliss says. “Hopefully, the oysters can give that balance between different shellfish and help them weather the storm. Market demand for oysters has stayed high, even coming out of the pandemic. There’s good potential that farmers should do fine.”

While it’s unlikely the state will see the intense demand for wildharvested oysters from the canning industry again, the growing market for farmed Georgia oysters offers a new frontier for coastal fishermen. Georgia’s less populated coast and abundant clean water make the state an ideal location for increased oyster farming. Bliss and his team have seen significant interest from new farmers wanting to start operations in Georgia, as well as growers from other areas wanting to move their operations here.

Farming oysters also means more of the coastline’s natural oyster reefs could be left alone to do what they do best: protect the beautiful Georgia coast.