[music] [waves]
[seagulls]
- Perry Trial: Texas Gulf Coast is
just a special place. I've grown up fishing along the Texas coast. I'm an avid angler.
All of this…matters to me the mission of our agency and of coastal fisheries
to protect and conserve resources matters to me on that personal level.
[waves]
- Perry: There's a tremendous diversity of habitat types and fish to fish for.
[seagulls]
- Perry: You know, there's shrimp
and oysters that can be harvested by commercial fishermen and served to you in a restaurant.
[seagulls]
- Emma Clarkson: So, it's our job at Texas Parks and Wildlife to make sure that
the bays stay healthy and can continue to support all of the
people and the organisms that want to use them.
[boat engine]
[horn]
- Zach Olsen: We’re going to head out
and do some oyster dredge sampling today. We're going to head out too Long Reef in Aransas Bay.
- Perry: You know these organisms,
you know these various habitats that we find in the in the bay system,
whether it's spartina marsh, or seagrasses, or oysters,
you know, they're all critical to the health of the bay system.
[oyster basket emptying]
- Emma: Oysters are really important because they
support a booming economic industry. And Texas’ $30 million. They also improve water quality.
They protect shorelines. They protect from erosion. They're
just really really economically and ecologically important.
-Brian Bartram: The oyster reef
itself serves as a complex structure for fish and a and juvenile fish to
hide from predators and grow up and become adult fish. So, it serves a habit, a huge habitat role.
[oyster basket emptying]
- Zach: And so, we've seen in many other areas the world as oyster reefs
begin to degrade, ah so go the rest of the ecosystem a lot of times.
- Emma: Oyster management
is incredibly complicated because they're both a habitat and a fishery.
So, when you fish them and you remove the individuals that you eat,
you're also removing the habitat that it takes to support more oysters.
[construction equipment]
- Emma: And so,
you have to put oysters back and put shell back. You have to restore it.
You have to not only think of how many organisms you're harvesting,
but how much shell you're harvesting, too.
- Emma: And so, it's one
of those management issues that span a lot of different areas.
[boat engine]
- Perry: There's a
lot of different ways we collect information on oysters. I mean,
we have boats that collect sonar data for mapping of oyster reefs and things like that.
We also sample the reefs themselves with what we call oyster dredges,
which is like a big rake with a bag on it.
[oyster dredge chain attaches] ready!
[water splashes]
- Zach: So that's going to drag
along the reef. It's going to pull up oysters, and then we're going to pull that into the boat
and just show you how we enumerate and measure and collect data on those oysters.
[oysters dumped into bucket]
[bucket dumped onto table]
- Perry: And we can look at those oysters and measure arm and count them. And by doing that,
you know, in a consistent way over time,
we can look for trends and how many there are. We can look at things like the percentage of
adult size oysters that we call market size oysters, which would be legal to harvest and sell
75!
- Perry: relative to small, you know, juvenile oysters.
79!
- Perry: So those are
a lot of the metrics that we would look at to kind of evaluate the health of the reef.
You know, certainly we want to find a balance with harvesting,
you know, what is an appropriate level of harvest.
But we need to balance that with the overall health of the ecosystem
and make sure that those oysters are there for harvest not only tomorrow,
but the next year and the year after that and the year after that and after that.
[oyster dredging]
- Zach: We have
fisheries here that that are really world renowned. We have redfish fisheries that
are world renowned with some of the last oyster fisheries that are world renowned.
And so, this is such a such a unique thing for us to have here in Texas.
And I think we really just need to value that and protect that as best we can.
[music]
[boat engine]
- Brian: It's our job as fisheries managers to make sure that we manage the populations and ensure that
harvest is occurring at a sustainable level so that not only our generation,
but your kids, your grandkids can continue to enjoy a fresh
meal of seafood and enjoy that resource for generations to come.
- Perry: The people
I work with are they're so dedicated and so good at what they do at protecting the
habitats and the bay and the water quality and the critters that live in the water.
I feel good that if one of these days when I do walk away from this job and
I have a lot more time to go fishing, you know,
there will be plenty of fish in the water and and I'll be able to to enjoy that.
- Perry: So, it's
always been important to me know to leave it in better shape than I found it. And
and I'm confident that with the quality of people we have working in parks and
all of that, that it's definitely going to be in good hands when I walk away.
[seagulls]
[music slowly fades]