Five oyster harvesters walk into a Mexican restaurant.
They gather there most mornings around 7 a.m., weather-worn hands picking at plates of hashbrowns and cups of coffee scattered across two shoved-together tables. Many of their families have lived in Eastpoint, just outside Apalachicola on the Florida Panhandle, for four or five generations.
Their conversation flows from grandchildren to deer hunting with an ease conveying their decades of friendship. Then it turns to the topic captivating their community: Apalachicola Bay reopening for oyster harvesting after a five-year hiatus.
“I’ve seen more excitement out of older people this month than I’ve seen in years,” said Owen Golden, 75, his eyes crinkling behind wire-rimmed glasses.
Apalachicola Bay opened Jan. 1 for a brief season lasting through the end of February. It’s the first time the bay has opened for commercial harvesting since 2020, when the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission closed the area due to declining oyster reefs.
At its peak, the bay was a cornerstone of Florida’s commercial oyster fishery and the community of Franklin County, south of Tallahassee along the Gulf coast. One in 10 wild oysters served across the country came from its waters. In a rural area of the state, the fourth-smallest by population out of Florida’s 67 counties, the commercial fishery supported over 2,500 jobs.
But 95% of oyster habitat has vanished since the area’s historic peak. No one factor caused the decline. Lower freshwater flow into the bay, increased presence of oyster predators, the removal of reef material, and over-harvesting all played a role. Apalachicola isn’t alone. Oyster reefs worldwide have experienced an 85% loss over the past two centuries as of 2008.
No two harvesters have the same opinions on the bay’s closure or its reopening. Some are frustrated with the wildlife commission, saying the agency didn’t fairly distribute commercial permits. Others work closely with its researchers. Some think more oysters should be harvested, others think less. But all agree their community came back to life this year.
A retired shrimper, Golden has already harvested oysters twice since the bay reopened two weeks ago. He filled seven 60-pound bags one day and 10 more another day – a feat his tablemates were quick to praise. Owen said it came at the cost of sore muscles.
Sitting across the table and stabbing a strip of bacon, Rickey Banks, 55, shrugged off Owen’s complaints. For him, he said, oystering will be a welcome break from his day job as a chartered fisherman. A self-described “OG” harvester, he plans to fill all 31 of his allotted bags so quickly it’s “gonna scare people.” The shellfish should be scared, too, he added.
“They’re out there trembling right now, knowing that I'm coming,” he said, referring to the oysters, as his tablemates chuckled in agreement. “They're scared. They can't even sleep.”
At the center of the table sat Shannon Hartsfield, 56, a fourth-generation Eastpoint resident who researches the bay’s ecosystem as a vendor for Florida State University. For over a decade, he has served as a middleman between the wildlife commission, researchers at the university and the harvesters in his community – looking out for the bay, he said, so it can look out for them.
Hartsfield first began asking Tallahassee lawmakers and researchers for help around 2011, a few years after he and the other harvesters noticed declines in the oyster population.
In 2012, former Gov. Rick Scott requested the determination of a commercial fishery failure. But the state didn’t close the bay, despite Hartsfield and the other members of the Seafood Management Assistance, Resource, and Recover Team asking them to do so.
Hartsfield watched the bags harvested per day drop from 20 to 10, then from six to two. Eventually, no one was making a living from the bay, with daily earnings dipping to around $120 per person. Finally, the bay closed for a five-year commercial harvesting ban in 2020.
Its reopening came on a reduced scale. The wildlife agency granted 152 commercial endorsements and 215 recreational permits for the two-month season, spokesperson Robin Simoneaux said. A commercial license grants weekday access to the bay and a harvest quota of up to 31 bags each.
Hartsfield has worked with oysters since he was 10 years old, when his mom paid him 25 cents per bucket to sort and break apart oyster clusters in a process known as “culling.” After securing his commercial permit, Hartsfield hit the water with his father, Abe Hartsfield, 77, who earned his own endorsement.
Not everyone was so lucky. Michael Edward Millender, 71, the owner of Island View Seafood, said he received only a recreational permit, allowing him to harvest just one bag, working on weekends only.
To qualify for the commercial endorsement, applicants needed to possess a saltwater products license, have had Apalachicola Bay wild oyster landings between 2012 and 2020, and be a Florida resident. Although all qualified applicants could receive an endorsement, prior oyster violations may have prevented some people from being approved, Hartsfield said.
The season hasn’t been a complete disappointment for Millender. Business at his retail market is soaring. He estimated he has sold more oysters in the first week after the bay opened than during a quarter of 2025. And the bay being open will help altogether, he said, hopefully getting more people back to work in the long term.
His small silver knife at ease in a hand experienced from six decades of practice, Millender pried open one of the fresh-caught oysters that has been captivating his customers for weeks. The oyster, about the size of his calloused palm, glistened under the fluorescent light overhead.
Ottice Amison, 53, a lifelong Apalachicola resident who owns the wholesaler Amison Seafood, said the tension between the residents and the wildlife commission is predictable.
“I don’t care if it’s Florida, Alabama, Louisiana,” he said. “The fishermen and the enforcement, there’s always going to be this.” He balled his hands into fists and pressed them together.
Amison doesn’t have anything bad to say about the commission, he said. Since winning a spot on the Franklin County Commission in 2022, he’s worked with the agency and state lawmakers to secure funding for the bay’s restoration. The best way to do so, he said, is to get more “material” out into the water.
Apalachicola oysters will grow on anything, he said: “You can throw my boot out there, and it’ll grow an oyster.” But the loss of reefs in the bay has left the shellfish without anywhere to stick.
Amison is hoping the state approves the $25 million in funding DeSantis has budgeted toward Apalachicola’s restoration. That money, he said, would help cover the expenses needed to bring pieces of concrete or limestone material to the bay. There, they would be scattered in the water to attract oysters to cluster and grow.
Amison plans to bring a 100-count bag of Apalachicola oysters to Tallahassee next week to show House and Senate leaders what their money can create.
“It has this effect on our community. It has this effect on our economy. It has this effect on Florida,” he said. He showed a cell phone video of his friend’s 83-year-old father culling oysters: “It just felt good to see him back out there … I get a frog in my throat,” he said, smiling.
The bay isn’t “spat-limited,” meaning there are lots of oysters scattered throughout its waters, said Chad Hanson, a science and policy officer with Pew Charitable Trusts, which is involved in the restoration of the bay. But they are spread across docks, pilings and rocks along the shoreline, not concentrated in areas where they can be easily fished.
“If you can concentrate material in areas where those larvae can gather and collect and grow … that will help re-seed the areas that historically have been fished,” he said. “We can both build habitat and enhance the fisheries simultaneously.”
Healthy oyster reefs create a healthy ecosystem, Hanson said. They function like coral reefs – improving water quality and supporting diverse marine life. Popular forage species like crabs and shrimp harbor in these structures, while fish like red drum and flounder use them to forage.
One degree up the oyster harvesting production chain, wholesalers are already reaping the benefits of the reopened bay. David Barber, 43, said 95% of the product sold at Barber’s Seafood in Eastpoint has come from out-of-state in recent years. But this year, wild-caught Apalachicola oysters have taken about 70% of their business.
Barber, referred to as “little David” by most of the town to distinguish him from his father, estimated his family’s wholesale giant has purchased, processed, and sold about two-thirds of the wild oysters harvested this season.
“Today, we only bought one load from Louisiana, one load from Texas, because we’ve had Florida oysters, and most people want Florida oysters right now,” he said.
Outside the window of Barber’s wood-paneled office on the second floor of the processing plant, where a dozen deer’s heads stare at him from the wall, an oyster harvester pulled his boat up to the dock. Randy Richards, 65, was hauling in 12 bags of oysters after spending six hours on the bay.
His camouflage-patterned overalls dampened with the rain that drizzled his boat around halfway through his trip, he chewed a slice of pizza he produced from his boat as a Barber’s employee pulled up with a forklift to haul his 720 pounds of shellfish over to the processing station.
“That about as pretty as most catches?” he asked as he reluctantly accepted help in hauling his bags from the boat to the lift.
While Barber’s pivoted to out-of-state products to fill the gap in wild-caught oysters, other wholesalers have turned to farm-raised oysters. Adrianne Johnson, the executive director of the Florida Shellfish Aquaculture Association, said she envisions aquaculture “coming alongside” wild harvesting.
Oyster farms can produce year-round, unlike seasonal wild harvesting. Farmed shellfish are smaller, rounder, and more consistent in size, Johnson explained, pulling up photos on her phone to demonstrate.
“I only have 1,000 pictures of oysters,” she murmured as she tapped through her camera roll on a phone housed in an oyster-patterned case.
Though a new industry in the state, shellfish aquaculture has expanded rapidly over the last few years, with 92 Florida growers reporting a combined $10.474 million in oyster sales in 2023.
None of the harvesters gathered around a table at El Jalisco seemed concerned with the competition.
“They’re thin-shelled, and they’re real small,” said Banks of farm-raised oysters. “Even the ones that are raised in Apalachicola Bay are not ‘Apalachicola Bay oysters.’”
The Apalachicola Bay waters have run in Banks’ blood for “probably four or five generations – more than I can count.”
He proudly pulled up photos of his son, River Banks, and daughter-in-law, also named River Banks, with his youngest grandchild, Creek Banks. But his slow Southern drawl takes on a note of wistfulness as he said their generation likely won’t carry on the oyster harvesting tradition that he, his parents, and his grandparents upheld for centuries.
He didn’t go out on the boat that day due to unsafe weather conditions: “See that flag standing up out there?” he says, pointing to the wind-whipped American flag standing outside the window. “That means you don’t want to go now.”
The difference between oystering now and oystering decades ago, he said, is that it didn’t used to “make a damn what the flag was doing. You went.”
Banks and his companions can’t be sure what will happen in the future. They can’t know whether restoration efforts will prove successful. Nor can they say whether, even if the oysters do return, there will be enough people in younger generations to take up the backbreaking work of harvesting them.
But that day, with the wind and chill keeping them from their boats, they lingered after their plates were cleared over cups of coffee. The oysters of Apalachicola can sleep soundly for another day.
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This story was produced by Fresh Take Florida, a news service of the University of Florida College of Journalism and Communications. The reporter can be reached at thomaszoey@ufl.edu. You can donate to support our students here.