On an unbearably hot and muggy summer day, trees offer welcome shade at the entrance to Bama Bay Oyster Farm. Mobile Bay glistens in the distance as waves lap serenely onto the shore. Cicadas chirp loudly under the steamy sunshine.
Many people know oysters through their dinner plates. Farm owner Jackie Wilson just has to reach down into the bay, grab a knife from her pocket and shuck it open.
“This is the America’s Amazon,” Wilson said.
In recent decades, oyster populations have drastically declined in Mobile Bay thanks to increasing human development and climate change. Sustainable oyster farms like Wilson’s are one small part of the effort to restore the oysters and their reefs. But the conservation initiatives are not easy.
Her commercial aquaculture facility sits on Mon Louis Island off the western shore of the bay, about 30 miles north of Dauphin Island. Initially started to sustainably raise oysters, Wilson now uses her business for education and outreach.
The ocean's water filter
Oysters have a lot to offer, Wilson said. Just like the Brita filter in a fridge, oysters serve as water filters for Mobile Bay. They’re a keystone species with their reefs providing nurseries for other sea life. Those reefs are also the first line of defense against storm surge during hurricanes. They can even fight climate change.
“You're sequestering carbon with every oyster you grow,” Wilson said.
Her commitment to oysters is in her blood; her family has lived on Mobile Bay for generations.
“I remember my great-grandfather telling stories when I was a kid of what the bay looked like whenever he was a kid,” Wilson said. “That will never exist.”
The decline
Over the past seventy years, more than 80% of the oyster population has collapsed in the bay. Wilson is working to revive the oysters with Mobile Baykeeper, an environmental advocacy group.
“Right now, we're in a negative feedback loop,” said Kayla Boyd, Mobile Baykeeper’s oyster project manager. “The fact we lost all our oysters degrades our water quality, which reduces the chances of us getting more oysters to set and grow, which then degrades water quality even further. It’s like we've got our hands on the airplane controls, and we're trying to yank ourselves out of a tailspin.”
Boyd said there is no single culprit behind the oyster collapse.
“It was more like a death of a thousand cuts,” Boyd said.
The threats
In the 1950s, engineers started dredging the bay to build ship channels. The excess mud, silt and sand stirred up in the water suffocated the oysters and destroyed their reefs. Wilson said it’s been an uphill battle ever since – especially if dredging isn’t done responsibly.
“Don't just openly disperse,” Wilson said. “ We already have silt coming from upstream. We don't need help with it anymore by you just digging it out and dropping it right back again.”
Oysters thrive in the nutrient-dense mix of salt and fresh water in Mobile Bay. But sometimes, there’s too much of a good thing. Agricultural runoff from fertilizer and manure farther inland can flow downstream.
“If that makes it out into the bay, you get hypoxia,” Wilson said.
That’s when water contains low levels of dissolved oxygen, which oysters need to survive. The pollution makes oysters more susceptible to disease or death.
A recent study found climate change can also impact oyster mortality. As oceans absorb more carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, they become more acidic, weakening oyster shells. Warmer water in the Gulf of Mexico is also a breeding ground for algal bloom, which depletes dissolved oxygen levels. The more hostile environment can cause oysters to choke out or die.
And if dredging, pollution and climate change weren’t enough to worry about, there are hurricanes.
Hurricanes are a perfect storm for oysters. Flooding disrupts the balance of fresh and salt water in the bay. And powerful waves stir up mud and silt, leading to excess sedimentation.
Last year, the Marine Resources Division of the Alabama Department of Natural Resources reported the lowest oyster harvest since 2017 – thanks to a combination of abnormally warm water disrupting dissolved oxygen and salinity levels. Officials expect 2026 to see lower numbers too.
But there’s some hope for oysters on the horizon. A new state law with bipartisan support goes into effect October 1. It requires any entity that dredges above a certain amount of material to put 70% of it to uses like shoreline restoration or marsh creation.
However, one of the biggest dredgers says the law doesn’t apply to them. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers recently told Mobile TV station WPMI the area is a federal shipping channel. So, state rules aren’t in play.
Kayla Boyd stressed that Mobile Baykeeper is not against economic growth from shipping in the bay.
“We just would like to see it done in a more environmentally-conscious way,” Boyd said.
Pearls of hope
Still, Jackie Wilson and her colleagues at Mobile Baykeeper will continue their efforts to help the oysters.
“Our tagline right now is research, restoration and resiliency,” Wilson said.
Wilson built a makeshift nursery just off the water where baby oysters can grow by attaching to recycled oyster shells. She carefully monitors the water composition in the tank and can adjust if the water is too acidic. The rehabilitation process helps give the young oysters an extra boost.
“[It’s like] a little steroid shot right before they go out into the bed,” Wilson said. “How can I make them as resilient as possible really quickly straight out the gate before we put them in the bay?”
Through Mobile Baykeeper people can sustainably grow oysters from about fifty piers around the bay. The group’s oyster project coordinator Rachel Ball said it’s a hands-on approach to bring the oysters back and a tangible way for people to connect with their roots.
“Oysters have been a way of life here for thousands of years, back when it was just indigenous people here,” Ball said. “Growing up here personally, hearing people talk about the abundance of oysters we had and all the seagrass we had, and I wanna see that come back here. It's a huge way of life, and it's really important. We're at the cusp of losing it.”
While these women are united in their work to restore the oysters and their reefs, that doesn’t mean they all want them on their dinner plates. When asked what she liked most about oysters, Wilson replied:
“I'm not gonna lie to you. I don't really know because I don’t eat them,” Wilson said. “That's a horrible answer. That is a horrible answer.”
