The Alabama oyster industry is not for folks who don't deal well with adversity. It's taken steps forward in recent years, returning from the brink when there was no harvest during the 2018-19 season. But that doesn't mean there hasn't been a stumble or two.
AL.com's Lawrence Specker reports that this year's harvest ends at 2 p.m. Friday, and since October the haul is just under 32,000 sacks -- well short of the 40,000-plus sacks the past two seasons.
A sack is around 80 or 85 pounds of oysters.
Marine Resources Division director Scott Bannon partly blames the slide on a little snail called an oyster drill, which shows up during times of high salinity in the bay. He can't hold an oyster knife so he drills a hole in the shell and eats the oyster.
While the 32,000 bags are well below the past two seasons, it's well above the 22,000 three years ago and 11,000 four years ago.
Biologists with Marine Resources aren't extremely optimistic about short-term future harvests. While divers were finding a lot of sizeable oysters for next year, they said they weren't seeing much in the way of spat, which take about two years to mature into grown oysters.
