For decades, the oyster shells left behind at seafood restaurants around Galveston Bay went straight into the trash. Today, many of those same shells end up stacked into mesh bags and lowered into the bay, where they form the foundation of new reefs. This shift, small in concept but large in scale, has become one of the more closely studied habitat restoration efforts on the Texas coast.
Hurricane Ike’s 2008 sediment burial damaged or destroyed roughly 60% of Galveston Bay’s oyster reefs
