This article is from the spring 2025 edition of Mobile Baykeeper’s print quarterly, CURRENTS. The magazine is mailed to active members who have given more than $50 in the past year. To get on the magazine’s mailing list, donate here.
By Cassie Bates, Edmund Davies, and Rachel Ball | Photos by Courtney Mason
Driving from Mobile to Bayou La Batre, the landscape changes as you move from the multi-lane interstate of I-10 to the modest county roads, which eventually give way to shipyards and seafood processors. The way of life here is centered around water, with the bayou cutting through the city itself.
Avery Bates, a retired commercial fisherman and vice-president of the Organized Seafood Association of Alabama, embodies the Bayou way of life. Spinning tales in front of Graham Shrimp Co., Bates speaks passionately about the bays, waterways, oysters, shrimp, and fish he has known all his life. So much so that it becomes hard to distinguish between his life stories and the waterways he loves.
One of Mobile Bay’s natural resources is the treasured oyster. Before the 1950s, oyster harvesting was a booming industry with millions of oysters being shipped all over the country each year, including those canned by Graham Shrimp Co. The food industry wasn’t the only sector profiting from oysters; they were also being used for road construction, concrete, lime, and chemical production.
In 1946, Radcliff Materials (which became part of the Southern Industries umbrella through a merger in the mid-1940s, until Southern Industries was sold to Dravo Corp. of Pittsburgh in 1977) acquired permits from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to dredge 44 million cubic yards of relic oyster reefs — then valued at $46 million — in Mobile Bay. Shell-dredging continued, with the state of Alabama receiving more than a hundred thousand dollars in royalties each year from Radcliff’s shell-dredging project up until 1982.
The 44 million cubic yards of relic oyster reefs dredged by Radcliff Materials from 1946 to 1982 — reefs that had built up over thousands of years — represented nearly 47 percent of the Bay’s total historic reef footprint, according to a survey performed by Radcliff in 1971. Oyster reefs form complex interstitial networks which build on the foundations of oyster generations before them. Dead shells and even buried shells support this matrix to prevent surface reefs from sinking in the face of hurricanes or becoming buried due to sedimentation. Fossilized deposits in upper regions of the Bay, where salinities may have been too fresh, will likely become more viable as a foundation to support new oysters in the future, as studies indicate that pressure from climate change is leading to a gradual inland retreat of oysters.
Two dredge vessels, the “Mallard” and the “Gull,” began operations for Radcliff in north Mobile Bay in 1946. The vessels worked by sucking in bottom material, including the relic shell-layer, separating the reef material, blowing out the sediment, and leaving troughs and valleys in their wake. This method of removal created siltation in the water column, decreasing oxygen and sunlight and making it difficult for oysters to survive.
The mass excavation of these reefs over time had a deleterious effect on the livelihoods of those who worked in Coastal Alabama’s commercial seafood industry, including Graham Seafood Co. who stopped canning oysters in 1963 and started focusing on frozen shrimp. As an oysterman, Bates’ livelihood wasn’t left unscathed either.
“What upset me, my daddy, and my papa was the destruction by Radcliff of the living reefs,” says Bates. “It’s the worst thing for a reef when you put silt on it. It suffocates everything.”
By the 1970s, oyster markets stopped taking oysters that Avery harvested near shell-dredging efforts because they were filled with silt and not marketable.
Radcliff may have employed a couple hundred people, but Avery remembers there being 300-plus oystermen working the reefs and more than 50 shops processing oyster harvest in the 1970s.
“Think of the magnitude of the families that were fed from this line of work,” he says with some resignation. “My step-papa had ten kids. Five of them opened oysters and five of them caught oysters. Any of them that got old enough to have young’uns got in line with the trade just like my family, my daddy, and those before him.”
Dredging has a cascade effect when you remove a key habitat like oyster reefs because a healthy fishery depends on it. Oyster reefs attract species like crab, shrimp, fish, and help the growth of seagrass. Bates explains that oystermen hollered the loudest because oysters can’t swim away from stress, and they are foundational to everything else.
Bates notes how important it is to build oyster reefs back; not only for an oysterman’s business needs, but because, he says, “This fellow likes to eat fish, this fellow likes to eat oysters, this fellow likes to eat crab, and this fellow wants oxygen in the water so you don’t have a jubilee every week.” Oystermen have perhaps been affected first and foremost, but other species in the Bay — as well as other seafood industries — have seen impacts as well.
While the oystermen might’ve hollered the loudest, there was public concern over shell-dredging in the Bay. This led to Radcliff moving out of Mobile Bay in 1982 and focusing on other projects in Louisiana.
In 1983, Louisiana’s Attorney General William J. Guste Jr., along with several organizations in New Orleans, sued the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers for not providing an environmental assessment regarding Louisiana shoreline shell-dredging. (Environmental Impact Statements were first required by law in 1969, when the National Environmental Policy Act was enacted.). Because of this lawsuit, Radcliff could not continue their dredging projects in Louisiana.
In 1984, Radcliff requested new permits from the Corps to resume shell-dredging in Mobile Bay. Many had concerns about Radcliff’s request. The president of Mobile Bay Audubon Society, Myrt Jones, wrote to the Corps about these concerns, stating that “the scuttlebutt regarding why Radcliff moved out of the Bay about 2 years ago was [that] it was uneconomical to recover what ‘poor shell’ there was left. Why then since we finally got them out of our bay are we having to consider this devastating proposal.”
Jones ended her letter requesting that “Hopefully the state/federal agencies will just out-right deny the permit ‘in the public interest.’ These are ‘public lands’ and should receive every protection.” The Corps ultimately denied Radcliff’s request, ending oyster shell dredging in Mobile Bay.
Although shell-dredging left sizable scars, it’s not the only factor that contributed to diminishing oyster reefs. The decline of natural oyster reefs is a complex issue and there are many factors, both natural and man-made. Some examples include changes to natural river-flow, hurricanes, predation from oyster drills, over harvesting, and erosive wave energy. Loss and degradation of habitat and water quality from urbanization, port expansions, and wastewater discharge also played a role.
Bates says oysters would not be in such decline if it was just natural factors affecting them; they have survived for thousands of years combating natural factors. It’s the combination of natural and man-made factors that has caused such a rapid decline.
Within the span of three generations, the Bay that Avery’s papa experienced, the one with cleaner water and plenty of oysters, has turned into the Bay Avery knows now, with decimated oyster populations and water that isn’t always safe to swim in. Yet there are those who are accepting the responsibility of preserving oyster populations in Mobile Bay. There are volunteer oyster-restoration projects and other groups creating their own oyster-restoration initiatives, as well as oyster farming which continues to grow in the Bay. These actions are contributing to oyster restoration in real and tangible ways — witness the living oyster-reef locations in the southern parts of Mobile Bay starting to bounce back.
Indeed, we have the responsibility to protect our remaining oyster reefs and restore what we once had. Avery Bates believes in that. He is still fighting to protect our precious Mobile Bay and its oyster population at the age of 75. Why?
“I’ve got two grandkids that like to come down and fish and eat oysters too,” he says. “I want them to still be able to enjoy the bays and the bayous that we’ve always enjoyed.”
Edmund Davis prepares oysters for reef deployment as part of Mobile Baykeeper’s Oysterkeeper program
Management of natural resources has historically been an ambiguous pursuit where it’s often unclear if actions are protective of both resources and resource needs. Man carries the responsibility of being Earth’s stewards, which by design is a mutually beneficial relationship as our natural resources were once thought to be inexhaustible. However, this relationship is often abused and unequally skewed towards the demands of the steward. The story of relic reef management in Mobile Bay begs the question, at what point does the pursuit of our own prosperity eclipse the prosperity of nature? Does progress always have to beget the plight of our resources? I believe there is a way to achieve growth without sacrificing the resource, it just requires a shift in perspective.
We should not look at the mistakes of the past like the Radcliff shell dredging project as a reason to become apathetic and not focus on oyster restoration today. As responsible stewards, we must learn from the past and actively choose not to make the same mistakes. It is our duty to “build back” the oyster reefs, and many groups are already contributing to that goal in real and tangible ways. We have the responsibility to fight to protect our remaining oyster reefs and restore what we once had, not just for ourselves, but for our community, our way of life, and for future generations. Our prosperity is inherently linked to the prosperity of nature.
— Cassie Bates, staff scientist at Mobile Baykeeper
