Josh Wilkie and Fabio Galarce leaned over the side of their boat and hauled up a basket full of oysters, each just an inch or two in size. Wilkie grabbed his shucking knife, popped one open and slurped down the silky meat inside.
“They’re our babies,” he said. “We’ve got 50,000 of them in the water.”
Florida’s once-thriving oyster reefs have suffered over the years, hammered by overharvesting, oil spills and other pollution, rising salinity and increasingly intense hurricanes driven by climate change. And the loss of those wild oyster reefs can actually make some climate impacts worse, since they help protect coastlines from storm surge and erosion.
But now, a small South Florida company is trying to bring them back in a surprising location. Not in Apalachicola Bay, the Panhandle waters long famed as Florida’s oyster capital, but much farther south and deep in the Everglades.
🔗 You can read the full story at the link in our bio
✍️ Ashley Miznazi
📹: Ashley Miznazi with drone footage from @matiasocner ( Additional footage from Getty Images, CBS 42 and The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine)
📸: @matiasocner
🎵: Dirt Rhodes by Kevin MacLeod