Postcard from the Incredible Electric Oyster Reef
It used to be that the streets were paved with shells.
In the 19th century, a vast oyster reef underneath Nueces Bay formed a kind of road from the small port town of Corpus Christi to settlements on the other side of the bay. Since there were no real streets, people would use the oyster reef to travel across the bay, splashing in their horse and buggies through seawater that rose, clear and shallow, a few feet above it.
From the 1840s through the turn of the 20th century, the population in the Coastal Bend surged, and with it came heavy construction. In Corpus Christi and nearby towns, houses were built and city streets were paved with bricks of shellcrete, a cheap building material mixed from water, sand, and oyster shells mined from the reefs. As recently as 1950, shellcrete was used for constructing houses, and as more people moved to the region, the oyster reefs began to disappear.
By the 1980s, the extensive oyster beds in Corpus Christi and Nueces bays that took tens of thousands of years to accumulate were gone. Without a hard reef, coastal winds churned up the soft bottom of the bays. Murky, sediment-thick water disrupted the marine habitat, and the bays became a giant mud pool no longer capable of supporting an abundance of fish and plant life. The once-clear water now “looks like Yoo-hoo, all of the time,” said Aaron Baxter, a marine biologist at Texas A&M University at Corpus Christi.
Read more: http://www.texasobserver.org/postcard-incredible-electric-oyster-reef/
