FWC weighs first oyster harvest overhaul for Big Bend since 1991

First rule change since 1991 on the table

Oyster harvest regulations that have governed the Big Bend since 1991 could see their first overhaul in more than three decades, following a Sept. 3 workshop hosted by the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission at the UF/IFAS Extension office in Bronson. It was the third and final in a series of sessions the agency ran from August through September, gathering feedback on possible changes to season dates, daily bag limits and license requirements across Levy, Dixie and Citrus counties.

FWC declined an interview request but said in a written statement, provided by Division of Marine Fisheries Management communications coordinator Pebbles Causseaux, that no draft regulations exist yet. The agency said it is still collecting stakeholder input and will build recommendations around “the state of the resource.” FWC has set a goal of adopting uniform rules across the Big Bend region by 2027.

What current rules allow

Under existing regulations, commercial harvesters need a Saltwater Products License and a Shellfish Endorsement and can take up to 20 bags a day per person or vessel, whichever is lower. A bag equals two 5-gallon buckets, or roughly 60 pounds. Recreational harvesters need only a saltwater fishing license and are capped at two bags a day. The legal minimum size is three inches, though bags can include up to 15% undersized oysters if they are attached to larger shells, and 5% if unattached. Levy and Dixie counties currently run their season September through May; Citrus County’s runs October through June.

One option FWC raised at the Bronson meeting is a commercial endorsement modeled on the one Apalachicola Bay adopted after its oyster fishery collapsed in 2013, a credential harvesters there must hold to work that bay. At the Bronson session, FWC surveyed attendees on whether Big Bend commercial harvest should be capped. Of those who responded, 65% said there should be no limit and that harvest should stay open to any qualified applicant.

The workshop drew a small but experienced crowd: 12 respondents identified as commercial harvesters and five as wholesale dealers, and 73% of participants reported more than ten years of experience harvesting oysters in Florida. Public comment after the presentation surfaced skepticism among Big Bend residents, some of whom argued regulations alone will not fix the underlying decline and others who said the FWC has not sufficiently weighed local oystermen’s perspective.

The science behind the push

Gulf Coast oyster populations have fallen 90% since 1970, according to the article, pressured by disease, extreme weather and predators. Peter Frederick, a former University of Florida professor who began surveying Big Bend oysters around the time of the 2010 Deepwater Horizon spill, said rising salinity, driven partly by human freshwater use upstream, stresses oysters and leaves them more vulnerable to predation.

Frederick also pointed to what he calls “shell budget”: the base material, or culch, that oyster larvae need to attach and grow. As harvesting removes shell faster than it’s replaced, reefs flatten out and lose the structure that shields young oysters, sometimes pushing them into low-oxygen zones. His research found that harvesting more than 5% of oysters on a reef creates a negative shell budget, a threshold he called “ridiculously small” for anyone trying to make a living harvesting.

Frederick’s long-running survey work fed into the Lone Cabbage Oyster Reef Restoration Project, which rebuilt a three-mile chain of reefs at a cost of about $3 million. Restoration work wrapped in 2018, but monitoring through 2023 showed the oyster population there kept growing. Frederick said harvest rules are “the first thing everybody turns to” because they’re inexpensive and the state already has the machinery to enact them, but he argues lasting recovery will require more than tighter bag limits.

What’s next

No draft rule has been published. FWC says its recommendations will follow further review of the Bronson workshop input and resource data, with a target of uniform Big Bend regulations in place by 2027. No public comment deadline was listed in the agency’s statement.