EasternOyster_IkeandHarvey_McKinney_Larry_CorpusChristiTX_22November2021_Reel4081.mp3

Larry McKinney [00:00:00] Well, oysters, of course, have been part of Texas bays since, you know, since the bays have been here. And they seem to have survived. We've had the oyster reefs coming and going and moving about, in other words, growing in response to changing physical characteristics of bays.

Larry McKinney [00:00:21] But what we're seeing in our lifetime, and part of it is, I think, driven by climate change, in that our hurricanes are becoming more intense in several ways.

Larry McKinney [00:00:33] One, just what we're seeing, of course, is as these storms approach the coast in the past, they would move on through inland at, at whatever strength they happened to be rated at. But now we're seeing storms approach the coast, and because the waters are so much warmer than they had been in the past, they quickly intensify. And so the storms are more, we have higher intensity storms than we had in the past.

Larry McKinney [00:01:00] One of the examples being what happened with Ike, that when Ike came ashore in Galveston, it came into the bay in Galveston, it was so violent and it stirred the bays up so much, so much with mud, it buried more than half of the oyster reefs, just buried them to the point where the subsequent currents and tides would not clean them off. So we lost more than half of our oysters there in Ike.

Larry McKinney [00:01:22] And the other storm of note, related to oysters - Harvey - what that did was it produced so much rain, so much freshwater. Of course, we know about the impacts on the city of Houston and the tremendous flooding that they had never seen before the, the largest continuous rainfall ever recorded. I can't even remember the numbers of inches of rain that fell - in the 50s or something.

Larry McKinney [00:01:50] But that produced so much fresh water that the bays stayed fresh so long that not even oysters, which over time had evolved for floods, they had evolved to stand floods. This was beyond the scope of what they had evolved to, so they lost many oysters that way.

Larry McKinney [00:02:08] So this is, these are the pressures that, that we're, we're seeing now that we have not seen in the past that are spilling tremendous problems for oysters altogether.