PALMETTO — If you build an oyster habitat, they will come.
The Palmetto Community Redevelopment Agency is doing just that, sponsoring the Palmetto Bay Preserve Oyster Restoration, Water Quality and Aquatic Habitat Enhancement Project in the Manatee River between the Green Bridge and the CSX railroad bridge.
Back when the number of houses along the river was still in the double digits, the river was known as the Oyster River, but populations of the bivalve dwindled with increased development and resulting water pollution.
“The water quality hasn’t always been great in the river,” CRA spokesman Jake Bibler said, which prompted the $625,000 project, consisting of 380 concrete reef balls submerged in 23 acres of the river in 2024.
Since then, the structure has attracted baby oysters — or spats — which attached themselves and have grown and reproduced, said Dr. Ernesto Lasso de la Vega, principal investigator for the project and a CRA board member.
“Oysters are doing phenomenal,” he said, with tens of thousands on just one reef ball.
Oysters are filter feeders, a process that results in the highly prized bonus of cleaning the water around them, he said. They remove algae, nutrients and other pollutants that contribute to area water issues including algae blooms such as red tide, exacerbated by fertilizer-laden stormwater runoff, enterococcus bacteria, worsened by sewage leaks, and vibrio vulnificus (flesh-eating bacteria).
The reef balls are made from environmentally friendly concrete and are built to attract not only oysters but barnacles, tunicates and other marine life, said Lasso de la Vega, who dives the site once a month to monitor the effect on the river’s water quality.
The structure also attracts green mussels, an invasive species that arrived in the ballast of ships, he said, but they also filter the water, and oysters are attaching themselves to the mussels, too.
Thriving oyster populations attract fish and shorebird populations, improving biodiversity, one of the goals of the restoration initiative along with improving water quality, restoring native oyster populations and strengthening the long-term ecological health of the preserve.
“I was so honored to be asked to do this,” Lasso de la Vega said. “I’m dedicating my life to this because I see the future and I said, ‘I want to be part of this,’ because somebody in the future is going to say, ‘Hey, this looks good.’”
Cindy Lane is a staff writer for the Tampa Bay Beacons. She can be reached at clane@tbnweekly.com.