(AFP) – On the terrace of a seafood restaurant in Houston, the largest city in Texas, a few ladies enjoy a local preparation of oysters.
Breaded, the mollusks are slipped into a sandwich, not without having first been coated with mayonnaise. The customers, who enjoy this winter day at 20 ° C in the shade of a palm tree, have no idea that behind the restaurant a young woman is busy giving a second life to the shells.
Thanks to Shannon Batte, they will soon become a reef in Galveston Bay, 10 kilometers from here. Out of sight, the employee of the Galveston Bay Foundation loads on her trailer seven trash cans of 80 kilos, filled with oyster shells, but also water, forgotten forks and lemons. All year round, on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, she goes around the partner restaurants of her association.
“Most people eat oysters during the + r + months. As it is December, it is the right period. But because of the Covid, we do not have as many shells as usual,” he explains. -she.
“Our customers want to know where the oysters come from and where they go,” said Tom Tollett, owner of Tommy’s Seafood Restaurant & Oyster Bar, quoted by the foundation. This is where the first collection took place almost 10 years ago, in March 2011.
The tours have lengthened since today around ten restaurants around the bay participate in the program. On their menus or on their tables, logos and diagrams show the guests the fate of the thousands of shellfish collected: they will simply join the waters where they were formed. New oysters will settle and develop on it.
– “A real coastline of life” –
Pearl of Texas, Galveston Bay is an ecosystem particularly rich in seafood, thanks to the brackish mixture of fresh water from rivers and salt water from the Gulf of Mexico.
In 1845, when the state was attached to the United States, the town of Galveston already had its oyster bar.
But in September 2008, Hurricane Ike (113 dead in the United States) destroyed more than half of their habitat, suffocating their reefs with sediment.
To rebuild the ecosystem, the shells are therefore now dumped in the spring on rocks placed at the bottom of the water, on sites at low tides. Where the current is stronger, the crustaceans are gathered in nets and erected in dams.
They constitute a new habitat and also serve, by breaking the waves, to fight against soil erosion. The calmer water is then conducive to the development of vegetation.
“It’s a method that comes from a sister association in Florida, the Tampa Bay Watch,” explains Haille Leija, in charge of restoration at the Galveston foundation. “It creates a veritable coastline of life very different from the hard barriers that exist to protect the coasts”.
To date, the foundation is proud to have thus protected more than 30 kilometers of coastline and restored 20 hectares of salt marshes. It recovered 54 tonnes of shells in 2012, 125 in 2019 and 111 in 2020, despite the health context.
Once submerged, the shells are also perfect shelters for crabs, shrimp and small fish. So many wild animals that will feed larger ones and thus contribute to the diversity of the environment.
– A “cure site” –
Finally, developing the oyster population offers another advantage: each mollusk naturally filters up to 190 liters of water per day!
But before taking a dip, Shannon Batte’s seashells stop at what the foundation calls a “cure site,” a wasteland in Pasadena, between Houston and the coast.
The 33-year-old employee empties her garbage cans, removes the oyster forks and spreads the shells on the ground. Three months later, they will be turned over using a small backhoe loader. They will then spend an additional term in the fresh air.
This prolonged sun treatment in one of the three dedicated sites sterilizes the shells by killing bacteria and parasites. The first flies arrive without delay and soon four wild boars lick the shells and bite the lemons.
“They are less and less afraid and sometimes do not wait until I am gone to feast. I am wary of them because they can attack. Fortunately, I have a compressed air horn to scare them”, smiles the young wife.
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