VIDEO:  The Tide Falls in Lucy Point Creek, Beaufort, SC

At slack tide, paddling Lucy Point Creek from Morgan River and rounding Coosaw Island toward Sam’s Point and St. Helena Sound beyond, the intertidal oyster beds are great castle walls above your kayak; green and tan ramparts of Spartina above. These are sheltered waters in the lea of Ladies and Coosaw Islands, where sailors journeying down the Ditch will anchor during a blow, and wait for the sun to shine before continuing on to Beaufort or up through the ACE Basin toward Charleston.  If you know what you’re doing, you can anchor here and have room for the boat to swing with wind and tide.  If not, you may find yourself left high and dry atop the oyster reefs, a good time to build character and develop depth in relations with the crew.    If you squint, the oysters seem a camouflaged army marching out of the water and pluff mud toward higher ground.  Oystercatchers poke through the beds, their orange beaks aflame in the afternoon sun.  Looking up, there is a bald eagle looking back down.  This appears to be a thriving natural community, yet worldwide oysters and other sea life are disappearing from the earth.  The oysters here comprise some of the last surviving reefs on the East coast.

"In nature there are neither rewards nor punishments; there are only consequences.” 

-Robert Green Ingersoll

Beneath the wall of the oyster reef, in a momentary fit of humility, we may think of ourselves not at the top, but rather at the bottom, of a food chain that stretches back for thousands of years before anyone ever imagined this new world.  The philosopher David Hume posited that the life of a man may be of no greater importance to the universe than that of an oyster.  Paddling alone and lonely through this living soup, between the walls of dark oysters, the crackle of popping shrimp and things that go bump in the night all around you, you are moved to agree.

The Aboriginals

With a bit of experience, you can paddle in the Creek even on a moonless night, navigating by porch lights along general’s row, the bright sky over Beaufort, the foggy halo around Dataw Marina, and the smell of the sulfurous cloud that rises with each falling tide.   On dark nights, you may conjure up the aboriginals, our first people, who gathered and cooked these oysters, the remnant shell rings among the islands and rivers that bare the names of their descendents.  Paddling among the islands and their fringing oyster reefs, you are touring a living museum of natural and cultural history. Just as we live out our lives here upon the ruins and ruminations of our ancestors, these living oysters are built on the fragile foundations of their brothers and sisters.  Though they are not the robust and expansive vertical cities of oysters known to our forebears, their remnants can still be seen at low tide, on the fringing heaps of dead shell, the dolphin herding fry, clattering onto their banks.

The Industry of Oysters

As the first people harvested and used oysters, the early European colonists savored the meat, and used shell in agriculture and to build roads, docks and the tabby buildings that are scattered across the Lowcountry today.  Many are treasured historical sites visited by millions of tourists.  Although our continuing occupation has reduced oyster reefs that thrived here for thousands of years, the State’s reefs persist.

Our eastern oysters, Crassosstrea virginica, were harvested and consumed where salt and fresh water meet and mix, in the State’s estuaries.  They were harvested, shucked, iced and shipped to more remote areas, and later, canned and shipped farther away to Philadelphia and New York and beyond, as supplies of eastern oysters dwindled with the growing urban areas, and downstream, a tsunami of people, development and unbridled over-harvesting and pollution.

South Carolina oyster canning expanded in the early 1900s.  Among other locations in South Carolina and Georgia, the Maggioni Canning Company in Port Royal, SC employed Gullah whose bateaux transported oysters to factories where Polish immigrant and local men, women and children annually harvested and processed over a million bushels of oysters.  In the 1900s, over 3,000 people were employed among the oyster factories in the State.  If shell was returned to supply a firm substrate (cultch) for young oysters (spat) to attach and grow, the cycle continued.  Oysters companies not only returned shell to existing beds, but encouraged new reefs in order to expand production, yet supply and demand favored demand, and the carrying capacity of the estuaries was exceeded.

Oysters Decline

From the heyday of oyster production and canning in South Carolina in the 1900s, to the 2008-2009 season when 95,100 bushels gathered, there has been a confluence of human enterprise at the expense of the natural world.  Swamps were drained and hardwood and long leaf pine forests were logged and replaced with a monoculture of pine plantation, resulting in a rapid erosion of soils that in turn covered the oyster beds.  Phosphate mining scoured the bottom of coastal rivers.  The building of the Intracoastal Waterway forever changed the typography of the coast and the salinity of its waters. Along with natural events, world wars, typhoid scares, and the Great Depression resulted in the steady decline of oysters and oystering. 

There was an increase of harvesting in the 1960s, yet the industry never returned to its prominence of the 1900s, and the last oyster cannery on the east coast pulled the switch in Beaufort, SC in 1986.  Massive environmental destruction, and other forces, reduced both oysters, and the lives of families in the hard labor of oystering, however Bill Anderson, Manager, Shellfish Management Section for the South Carolina Department of Natural Resources, states that  “SC intertidal oysters are resilient.  Approximately seventy percent of the oyster populations flourishing in 1900 are thriving in South Carolina today.”  This is good news when one compares South Carolina to the Chesapeake Bay and other areas, where less than 1% of oyster beds remain.

SC Oysters Today

Today, oysters harvested in the state are typically consumed in the state, during the season of September 16 to May 16, although the opening and closing of the season varies depending on a variety of conditions.  The historic Maggioni oyster culture permits are still managed today by Roddy Beasley from a location on St. Helena Island.  Local harvesters slog through the mud to gather and cull oysters, hauling them to Beasley’s facility for washing, weighing, bagging and sale.  “It’s a hard business,” says Beasley.  “Oyster are culled on the beds, lifted into the boat, onto the dock, and then hauled here to be washed, bagged and sold.”  “Working six days a week, a harvester lifts a 60 pound bushel many times, before it gets to the customer.”   Having worked in the business of for decades, managing the last Maggioni cannery, Beasley believes that he, and others, are being regulated out of business.  “Volume is the name of the game, and if we can’t get enough oysters, we can’t survive,” he said. 

 “As I ate the oysters with their strong taste of the sea and their faint metallic taste that the cold white wine washed away, leaving only the sea taste and the succulent texture, and as I drank their cold liquid from each shell and washed it down with the crisp taste of the wine, I lost the empty feeling and began to be happy and to make plans.”

-Ernest Hemingway

Beasley and others sell oysters in the shell, primarily to the wholesale market in the Southeast.   Local oysters are purchased for traditional oyster roasts, and by retailers, wholesalers, restaurants, and caterers.  The local oysters are generally cluster oysters, rather than singles.  The larger, fatter single oysters are typically imported into the state from the Gulf.  Though the growth of singles in South Carolina has yet to dent the volume of imported Gulf oysters, efforts are underway to expand mariculture operations in order to produce single, more valuable oysters with cultivation from (triploid) oyster broodstocks that are unable to reproduce.

State agencies manage the beds including state and public shellfish grounds, culture permits and grant areas, to insure the health of the reefs and consumers.   Additionally, there are programs at work to increase the size and numbers of oyster beds, through programs such as SCORE, South Carolina Oyster Restoration and Enhancement.  SCORE’s mission is to increase the amount of oyster shell recovered in the state and to return the shell as substrate for new oyster reefs.  The restored reefs serve as platforms for research, while educating the public, fostering stewardship, and increasing public awareness about oysters reefs.  Since 2002, SCORE has organized volunteers who have collected, bagged and returned oyster shell to the water.  To date, over one acre of new substrate for oysters has been built and thousands of children and adults have been educated about oysters and the importance of water quality.  Volunteers not only gather and bag shell that becomes the foundation for new reef, but also monitor on-going progress of the reef and water quality in the areas.   According to program director, Nancy Hadley, “The answer to improving oysters reefs is empowering people to take personal responsibility for the stewardship of oysters.” To increase the amount of SC shell returned to oysters beds, there is an expanded effort to gather shell from local restaurants and other sources, reducing the quantity of shell and other materials that are purchased from other states.  

The Reefs at Risk

Divers travel around the world to swim along the world’s great coral reefs, and as coral reef communities decline worldwide, diver’s color photos are becoming an historical archive.   It’s difficult to take reef photos while diving in South Carolina’s turbid and tidal coastal waters, yet twice a day as the tide falls, the state’s intertidal oyster reef treasure is on display; no less threatened than coral reefs, and no less complex and important as habitat and nursery for countless species.

"Falstaff: I will not lend thee a penny.

Pistol: Why, then, the world's mine oyster, Which I with sword will open."

-William Shakespeare

 Today, oysters are imperiled worldwide, according to “Shellfish Reefs at Risk: A Global Analysis,” a report recently released by The Nature Conservancy.  According to the Conservancy, the world’s oysters are dead and dying.  “Globally, 85 percent of reefs have been lost, making oyster reefs the most severely impacted marine habitat on the planet. “ 

In the Conservancy report, South Carolina’s oysters compare well to other regions of the world, with the loss of fewer than half of oyster populations during the past 100 years.  An enthusiastic advertising agency could call South Carolina, “The Oyster State,” given the oyster’s cultural and natural history, and the comparative health of its reefs. Beaufort County, with its high-salinity Port Royal Sound would be at its center. According to the Conservancy report, in some areas of the world such as Biscayne Bay, FL and San Francisco Bay, CA, oysters are functionally extinct.  In South Carolina, the local Conservancy Chapter is supporting SCORE’s shell recycling project, as well as reef restoration efforts on intertidal lands owned by the US Forest Service and the US Fish and Wildllife Service, in areas presently closed to harvest.  Here, the Conservancy hopes to realize the maximum ecological values of oyster reef restoration. 

Oysters' Ecological Value

Oysters have been called “the canary in the coal mine” of marine species, as they are indicators of the health of the system that sustains them; or doesn’t.  So what is the ecological value of the oyster reef?  One often hears the coral and oyster reef compared for the biological diversity they support and encourage, and the strategies they employ to survive.  Bill Anderson thinks of an oyster reef as a forest of cacti, pointing to the comparative benefits of the vertical cactus, and the vertical clusters of oysters rising from the substrate; the nooks and crannies of both “forests” offering habitat and other benefits to the many species.  Oysters are filter feeders, that is, they pump water through their gills for roughly 12 hours a day when they are submerged.  In doing so, they filter out plankton and other particles, taking their nutrients, along with sediments and contaminants, from the water. Their labor improves water clarity and quality. An oyster may filter 2.5 gallons of water per hour, a most compelling ally in the fight for cleaner water.  Larval oysters, swimming around and looking for a solid place to settle down, are food for the reef community, and oysters are a source of food to other species throughout their lifetime of 20+ years. In addition to a food source, the reef also provides a home from other animals and plants living on the reef.  It is estimated that as many as 300 species of animals are associated with oyster reefs, including not only invertebrates, but also birds, mammals, and fish.   Reefs help to stabilize the bottom, preventing erosion, and serve as a natural storm barrier in the event that the Big One blows up the coast. 

“Even though oysters are entirely stationary, they are the Lowcountry's original fast food.  Thick carpets of shell at prehistoric Native American sites give mute testimony to that.  The Ancient Ones grew fat and indolent on mullet, deer and wild turkeys too and we still find those bones mixed with the shell.”

-Roger Pinckney

And of course an entire industry and cultural history has been built literally on the backs of the oyster and the people who have gathered, processed and sold them.  Yet oysters seem prolific.  They cast their seed upon the water.  As the water warms, oysters release millions of sperm and eggs in an orchestrated and dazzling flurry.  Eggs are fertilized, and the successful offspring dodge predators, to settle down to make a living.  In spite of millions of fertilized eggs, possibly fewer than a dozen oysters will reach maturity.

If oyster reefs are so prolific and provide such positive benefits to people and to other living things, why are they in decline?  As oysters are filter feeders, they are sampling the water with the tides.  A third of the oyster beds in the state are closed to harvesting, because the oysters need time to recover from harvesting or due to elevated fecal coliforms, rendering them unhealthy for human consumption.  Oysters are what they eat, so clean water spawns healthy oysters.   As the coastal area of the state is rapidly growing in human population, there is an increase in residential and commercial construction.  Construction practices can result in both increased pollution and sediments that cover reefs.  Dock construction can push oysters into the mud and destroy them.  Boat wakes erode the shoreline, causing sediments to cover the reefs, and boat propellers score and destroy reefs.  On a macro scale, even if the human threat to local oysters can be remediated, the larger and less locally controllable impacts of global warming, sea level rise, and change in the pH of the sea can take their toll on oysters, and on us.

Efforts Toward Restoration

But there is good news.  Though in decline, South Carolina oysters are in comparatively good shape relative to other worldwide populations.  There are things one can do to support the return of healthy expanding reefs.

• Oyster are close to shore and live largely in the area between our high and low tides, so we can increase protection of oysters by protecting life in the intertidal zone, the area downstream from our houses, docks, bridges, marinas, boat wakes, bulkheads, houses, lawns, storm water and sewers.
• For reefs that have been disturbed and destroyed, we can increase our restoration efforts, by increasing the return of shell and other materials in the area where oysters can find homes.
• We can manage existing oyster harvesting in a sustainable way, while closely monitoring the impact of harvesting.
• Efforts to introduce non-native species can be prohibited, while we restore and protect native populations.
• We can improve water quality.
• Well-managed mariculture operation may offer the hope of providing both ecological benefit and sustainable products.
• We can begin to think of oysters as an indicator of the health of our marine areas, not only in our backyards, but also  across regions.
• We can find out how other coastal communities are managing oysters, and exchange our successful strategies.
• Oysters keep a low profile.  We can develop educational and informational programs that increase the visibility and importance of our most imperial marine resource and our unique and importance estuarine areas.
• We can support government, NGOs,  and businesses that work to preserve and protect reef communities.

The Great Oyster Reef of South Carolina

The Great Oyster Reef of South Carolina is no less important and no less imperiled than the world’s more abundant tropical coral reefs.  The Great Oyster Reef is a quilt of small patches scattered down the coast, along the edges of fringing islands, dredge spoil, and up inlets, brackish rivers, tidal creeks and ponds. In South Carolina they live in Beaufort County, between Calibogue and Port Royal Sounds; in Charleston County from the Folly River area to Cape Romain; and in Georgetown County from Hobcaw Barony to Murrells Inlet. They live just outside our door, on the edge, between the high and low tides, like neighbors you may see twice a day.  Oysters are opportunists. They attached to bottles, cable, dock pilings, concrete riprap, and most anything able to give them a good footing, within their narrow requirements for life. They are often invisible to the casual visitor, seen only at low tides, encountered with a crunch when a bow strikes a reef, or as they slide down the throat with a cold beer.   In State waters, they comprise just 3,000 acres in total, and if gathered, they would all fit on Hunting Island, SC with plenty of room to spare.   The total annual harvest for the sale of oysters is less than 1.5 million dollars; the approximate cost of 100 feet of four-lane highway, or a modest house on a resort island.  Today, perhaps 70% of the reef found here 100 years ago remains, yet it’s not the robust reef that supported aboriginals for thousands of years, or the oyster trade of the past 100. 

The World Was Our Oyster

During the industrial age, the world was our oyster.  At a time when oyster populations were over-harvested and despoiled and the Southeast’s longleaf pine forests were further reduced from millions to thousands of acres, we lived in a fantasy of limitless natural abundance. Railroad trestles jumped across rivers and snaked into primordial swamp.   We harvested our biological diversity that Harvard professor E.O. Wilson calls “the creation.”  In Maine, Boston, New York, the Chesapeake Bay, and elsewhere, oysters were gathered and consumed with abandon.  The economy that depended on the mindless extraction of natural resources is broken.  Today there is a sea change toward restoration and stewardship of our depleted natural resources, including our reefs, and toward sustainable management.  In thinking of each living thing as a collaborator in the work to sustain life and health, we may not only save our marine communities, but also ourselves.  In Wilson’s words, "We need freedom to roam across land owned by no one but protected by all, whose unchanging horizon is the same that bounded the world of our millennial ancestors." 

WATCH THE TIDE FALL ON LUCY POINT CREEK, REVEALING THE OYSTER REEF

Dig Deeper

Burrell, Victor G. Jr. 2003. “South Carolina Oyster Industry:  A History.”

Coen, Loren and Walker, Rebekah. 2006. “Intertidal Oysters and the Reef Habitat They Generate.”

The Lowcountry Estuarium

The Nature Conservancy

The Nature Conservancy's Shellfish at Risk Report

The Nature Conservancy South Carolina Chapter

SCDNR. 2004 “State of Oysters and Hard Clams Report.

SCDNR. 2007 “State of Oysters”.

The South Carolina Coastal Conservation League

For Slow Guides ™: 

Writer:  Bill Pendergraft

Web Design:  Ken Hawkins

Photo Credits:  

Environmental Media Corporation

Archival photos by Lewis Wickes Hines  from the Library of Congress collection, 1911.

Joy Brown, The Nature Conservancy South Carolina Chapter.  Clay Bolt & Flight/Southwings

Nancy Hadley, Shellfish Biologist, SCORE, SCDNR

Thanks to:

Bill Anderson, Manager, Shellfish Management Section, South Carolina DNR

Roddy Beasley, Maggioni Seafood

Joy Brown, The Nature Conservancy, South Carolina Chapter

Garrett Budds, South Carolina Coastal Conservation League

Nancy Hadley, Shellfish Biologist, South Carolina DNR

Andrea Malloy, South Carolina Coastal Conservation League

Roger Pinckney, Author, Daufuskie Island

Mark Robertson, The Nature Conservancy South Carolina Chapter

Al Segars, South Carolina DNR, who first gave us a tour of the Lucy Point Creek Reef

Ben Stone, South Carolina DNR

Laura Von Harten

Amber Von Harten, SC Seagrant

The Epilogue:  Oyster Dressing

When I was a boy, growing up in North Carolina, a couple of hundred miles from the nearest oyster reef, we ate oysters at Thanksgiving; the deciduous Westwood forest bare-limbed and cold.  Standing around the kitchen counter, my father would reverently share a few raw oysters with a bit of Tabasco and crackers, and the great remainder would be cooked with onions, breadcrumbs, celery, seasonings and butter.  The raw oysters and oyster dressing were always a favorite, and there were usually a couple of sneaks in the kitchen after midnight, polishing off the remains.   Oysters were scarce; a special annual treat, like a new pair of shoes, and for them and each other, we were thankful.

Mom’s Recipe:

• 2 pints oysters
• 1 cup butter
• 1 cup chopped onions
• 14 cups fresh breadcrumbs
• 2 cups chopped celery
• 3 teaspoons salt
• 2 teaspoons ground black pepper
• 1 teaspoon thyme
•  Secret seasonings

"The Oyster is Your World:  A Visit to the Great Oyster Reef of South Carolina" is a work in progress.  We invite your comments and suggestions. We are especially interested in compiling a comprehensive list of businesses that market local oysters, while returning their shell to South Carolina's reefs.

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Slow Guides ™ is a Registered Trademark of Niche Publishing LLC.