State officials provided their annual forecast for Alabama’s wild oyster harvest on Thursday, and the outlook is encouraging in the short term but not comforting in the long term.

Prior to the season opening in the fall, scientists with the Marine Resources Division of the Alabama Department of Conservation and Natural Resources conduct dives and collect samples from the reef areas that will be open to harvesting later in the year. Those results provided the basis for the presentation that biologist Jason Herrmann delivered to oyster harvesters Thursday in Bayou La Batre.

Herrmann said that in the areas known as Heron Bay, Cedar Point East and Cedar Point West he’d found respectable numbers of mature oysters. In Cedar Point East and West, they were lower than in 2022 but still higher than 2021. In Heron Bay, he found more mature oysters than in 2021 and twice as many as in 2022.

That sets expectations that the 2023-24 season will be a decent one, by modern standards. The 2021-2022 season was the best in more than a decade with 49,314 sacks brought in by commercial harvesters. The 2022-23 season wasn’t far behind, with 44,408 commercial sacks. (A sack, as defined by Alabama regulations, translates to roughly 80-85 pounds of oysters in the shell.)

Hermann noted that by historical standards, recent harvests have been low. They’re a fraction of what they were a century ago, and small even by comparison with many years in the ‘80s, ‘90s and 2000s. But the general trend has been a rebound from 2018-19, when there was no commercial wild oyster harvest at all.

The other side of Herrmann’s report was not so upbeat. He found uneven numbers of small “sub-legal” oysters, the ones that might be ready for harvest a year from now. Heron Bay’s numbers were far up, while Cedar Point’s were down.

The real problem was with the number of spat, the juvenile oysters that won’t be ready for harvest until the 2025-26 season. Spat levels were way down across the board. In Heron Bay they were a little above the level from two seasons ago, but off Cedar Point they were by far the lowest seen in recent years. Hermann said an extended period of low salinity early this year may have been the major factor in the spat decline.

“What I’m not seeing in my samples are the babies,” said Herrmann. “That’s worrisome as far as what happens next year or two years down the road.”

Herrmann and Marine Resources Division Director Scott Bannon said they expect the season to open on Oct. 2, with one caveat. Bannon said he might opt to push that back as much as a couple of weeks if prices are low.

The daily limit for commercial harvesters will remain six sacks. However, harvesting will be open on weekdays only and won’t include any Saturdays as it has in recent years. Officials said the Saturday openings had been intended to make it easier for harvesters to pass the tradition along to school-age family members, but they hadn’t seen that pan out.

“Generally we didn’t have a lot of youth participation,” said Herrmann. “It ended up just being another harvest day.”

Herrmann and Bannon fielded numerous questions about an ongoing oyster restoration project that is laying down limestone in 77 acres of water in Cedar Point West. The rock is intended to provide habitat for oyster larvae to settle and develop into spat, but some were concerned it would bury productive areas. Herrmann assured harvesters that he and other planners had taken pains to make sure the rock wasn’t going down in productive areas.

Harvesters also got a brief presentation from Mobile County officials about a project to build up the protective shoreline on the west side of the causeway leading to Dauphin Island. That work is likely to proceed in October, they said, and may require harvesters to take a different path to Cedar Point East.

The most contentious portion of the meeting concerned a $2 per sack “shell fee” imposed in 2010. The money is collected from the seafood dealers who buy the oysters from harvesters; some harvesters present for Thursday’s meeting said that some local dealers had said they found it onerous and weren’t going to buy Alabama oysters.

“I’m not oystering this year if I can’t sell them,” said one.

Bannon said it was a free-market issue and that he believed other local dealers would continue to buy local oysters. No seafood dealer spoke to the issue.