Somewhere off the coast of South Padre Island, Texas, sits a patch of ocean floor that, as is the nature of the world, flat and muddy. Today, this same section of the Gulf of Mexico supports a wilder environment than ever imagined, with roughly 24.4 tons of fish all concentrated around mounds of abandoned railroad ties and pieces of concrete that people dumped out there.
A 2026 study titled “Comparison of fish biomass and fish carbon content associated with reef sites at the Rio Grande Valley artificial reef in the Gulf of Mexico,” published in PLOS One by University of Texas Rio Grande Valley researchers,
