- [Jay] Funding for this program was provided by... - [Chrissy] The J.W.

Couch Foundation.

- [Jay] Caesar Kleberg Wildlife Research Institute at Texas A&M University Kingsville.

- [Chrissy] Harte Research Institute for Gulf of Mexico Studies at Texas A&M University Corpus Christi.

- [Jay] The Gulf of Mexico Trust.

(upbeat music) - [Chrissy] Threshold Foundation.

- [Jay] Shield-Ayres Foundation.

- [Chrissy] Alice Kleberg Reynolds Foundation.

Gossamer Gear.

Cina Alexander Forgason.

Pam and Will Harte.

- [Jay] Helen Alexander, Blair and Wade G. Chappell, Claire Dewar, Cheryl and Paul Drown, Deborah and David McBride, Myfe Moore, Shirley and Dennis Rich, and the Texas Water Foundation.

- [Chrissy] For more information and a complete list of funders, please visit chasingthetideseries.com.

- [Jay] The Texas coast.

(upbeat music) - [Chrissy] From the Sabine River to the Rio Grande.

- [Jay] It's diverse.

- [Chrissy] It's industrial.

- [Jay] It's a buffer.

- [Chrissy] A gateway.

- [Jay] And it's rapidly changing.

- [Chrissy] We're gonna show it to you as we walk every inch.

- [Jay] This is "Chasing the Tide".

- [Chrissy] Once on San Jose Island, we headed west.

The Gulf always on the left.

(upbeat music) We'd really settled into a groove at this point.

Walking 20 plus miles a day felt normal, if that makes any sense.

We were feeling lucky that blisters hadn't kept us from our goals.

We were excited because we had a day off in Port Aransas, and we were going to see our girls for the first time since we left 13 days ago.

Chef Adam Gonzalez, a big proponent of Texas seafood, cooked a paella, and friends from the Harte Research Institute for Gulf of Mexico Studies joined us on the beach.

- I hope y'all enjoyed.

Thank you for being here with us.

This is a Spanish dish, traditional, called paella, and it's an indigenous dish that started on the harbors of Spain.

So you start off with a sofrito, which is an onion, bell pepper, and chorizo base, and you saute your rice in it, and then you just stack flavors.

At the end, we'll put calamari and shrimp and clams.

If I can buy Texas seafood, I buy Texas seafood first.

Number one, you're supporting the state of Texas.

You're supporting the oyster guy.

You're supporting the bay fishermen.

You're supporting the shrimp industry in Texas.

And quite frankly, as a chef and a restaurateur for 40 years, there's no better shrimp in the world than Texas Gulf Coast shrimp.

It's just delicious.

Can you imagine Texas economy without the fishing industry?

I mean, from Whataburger to the little hotel right down the street, everybody, everybody benefits from a multi-multi-billion dollar fishery in Texas.

- [Jay] It was really great seeing everyone gathered there on the beach enjoying the atmosphere.

- Everybody run.

"Let's go, let's go to the shrimp boat, let's go to the shrimp boat."

(upbeat music) Salud.

Here's to fishing.

- [Jay] And we took a much needed day off to spend time with the girls, who we'd missed so much over the past 13 days.

- Ought to be a little bologna in there, too.

- Oh.

- Ooh, man.

- [Jay] We're staying at my grandmother's pink beach house a few miles south of Port Aransas.

Humble Oil ordered Sears and Roebuck kit houses and delivered them to Kingsville in the 1930s to accommodate managers of their new oil lease on King Ranch.

When the oil company no longer needed the homes, it offered them to a few of my family members.

My grandmother accepted one of the homes and had it shipped to Mustang Island, where it was placed behind the second line of dunes and remains today.

What I remember most about it as a kid was the oyster shell road leading up to the house.

I couldn't quite understand how those oysters made it so far from the ocean and then neatly lined up to pave the way to the pink house at the top of the dune.

I now know that those oyster shells most likely came from the bays around Corpus Christi after a century of over-harvesting that began in the late 1800s.

- [Chrissy] As the US and Texas populations increased near the turn of the 20th century, so did the consumption of oysters.

Between 1880 and 1910, the American oyster industry produced up to 160 million pounds of oyster meat per year.

Today, that number has dropped by 75%.

By the early 1900s, other great oyster fisheries had been over-harvested or were victims of pollution.

It took another decade for the decline of oysters to begin in the Corpus Christi area, with the damming of the Nueces River in 1913.

Oysters thrive in brackish water, formed by mixing fresh and saltwater in shallow bays and estuaries.

- [Jay] As the live oyster reefs were starved of fresh water, the need for oyster shells threatened to bury their prospects for recovery.

The foundation for live oyster reefs is built upon past generations, layers of shell and sediment dating back to the Pleistocene.

That shell became a vital component of the growth of the Texas Gulf Coast during and after World War II.

Thanks to the cheap energy from large gas deposits and boundless oyster shells as a base ingredient, Texas held a position for more than 40 years as the country's top producer and consumer of cement.

- [Chrissy] Over decades, and at times, with state oversight, the mudshell dredging industry stripped much of the rough-edged complex of shell and organisms from Texas bays.

- Oyster reefs in the Gulf of Mexico are in bad shape.

Over the past about two decades since around 2000, we started to see pretty large and consistent declines in oyster populations, not just in Texas, but across the Gulf.

We know that oyster reefs just don't seem to be able to catch a break.

So we see things like tropical storms come through, we see spills that can impact oyster reefs, and we see commercial harvest, which is ongoing as well.

All of these things are together, serving to, we think, decrease the population of oysters, as well as the integrity of the reefs that form that essential habitat.

- [Chrissy] The function that oysters provide to the bay ecosystem is nothing short of amazing.

- Oysters are economically and ecologically important to the Gulf of Mexico.

You know, an oyster is a really simple, kind of humble creature, right?

People always talk about who is the first person who was brave enough to eat an oyster, 'cause when you crack it open, doesn't really look very appetizing.

But people have come to understand that oysters provide a lot of benefits for us and for the environment.

So, they are filter feeders, so they open their shells up essentially all day, all night long, and filter water across their gills, and by doing that, they are feeding themselves and nourishing themselves and growing, but they are also cleaning and clearing our bay waters.

They build these enormous three-dimensionally complex reefs that help break up wave action as it moves across the bays, and helps other habitats like seagrasses grow that depend upon clearer waters.

We're just learning about the ability of oyster reefs to capture and store carbon.

Oyster reefs are essentially the coral reefs of our bay system, so they host really diverse numbers of fish, shrimp, crabs, and other organisms that you'll find nowhere else.

If the oyster reef goes away, those unique assemblages go away with them as well.

We're just learning now about the potential important role that oyster reefs have in capturing and storing carbon.

So we understand this really well for forests and wetlands and seagrasses, for example.

These are plants that take up CO2 from the atmosphere from photosynthesis, and they take that CO2 and they transfer it to their roots and to the sediments around them.

Oysters, of course, aren't plants, but they eat enormous amounts of plant material through phytoplankton.

And they take that phytoplankton material that's taken up the CO2 from the atmosphere, they consume it, and then they move it to the sediments at the bay bottom, where it gets buried over and trapped from circulation with the atmosphere.

- [Jay] Oyster reefs are important, not just for oysters.

They create a whole unique ecosystem, a whole unique city of organisms that depend on that habitat that you would find nowhere else.

- That community of organisms supports the larger sport fish that recreational fishermen depend upon.

So, the trout, the speckled trout, the black drum, the flounder that you can find around reefs, blue crabs, another commercial fishery you find associated with reefs, as well as stone crabs.

And again, when the reefs are degraded or destroyed, one by one, you see these organisms leave.

You can't find them reassembled that way anywhere else in the system, so the existence of that reef supports the existence of all of those other organisms.

So at the Harte Research Institute, we run the Sink Your Shucks oyster shell recycling program.

We have recycled over 3 million pounds of oyster shells since 2009.

The way that oyster shell recycling programs work is very simple.

When you go to a restaurant and you eat oysters, you go to a seafood festival and you eat oysters, instead of those shells, those shucked shells, going into the trash and being taken to the landfill, we intercept those, we bring special bins to our partner restaurants, we separate those shells from the trash, we stockpile them out in the sun for at least six months so they get nice and sun bleached, and then we take those shells and put them back where nature intended it, in the areas where reef has been degraded or destroyed.

(upbeat music) - [Chrissy] These discarded shells give young oysters, or seedlings, a place to establish and form new reefs.

To lessen the pressure on wild caught oysters, a new oyster farming industry has emerged in Texas.

- [Jay] The non-profit Palacios Marine Agricultural Research, or PMAR, has developed an oyster hatchery that provides oyster farmers with homegrown seed stock.

- We as an organization here are attempting to, you know, be the loss center for Texas and be able to, as a non-profit, not need to make a profit on a hatchery operation or a nursery operation, and kind of get the farming industry kick started with the understanding that theoretically in the future, there probably will end up being vertically integrated operations.

And we welcome that, we're not, you know, actually a commercial entity, even though we're playing that role right now, we are here to try to get the industry to a point where it could support an actual commercial entity coming in.

Every single one of these is an oyster.

And these are between four, six, and maybe even some of them are hitting to eight millimeters in size now.

(gentle music) - [Jay] PMAR's goal is to jump start a sustainable oyster industry on the Texas coast, which simultaneously provides more jobs and economic benefit to the area as it improves bay health, filters water, and sequesters carbon.

- [Chrissy] After we said goodbye to the girls, it was time to get back to the walk.

(upbeat music) We left Port Aransas and headed down Mustang Island towards Packery Channel.

(upbeat music continues) And of course, just about everywhere we went, we saw people sport fishing.

In Texas, more than one million saltwater anglers generate two billion annually, supporting thousands of jobs.

For many Texans, it's not just a hobby, it's a lifestyle choice.

- [Jay] And if there's one fish species that gets Texas anglers excited, it's the redfish.

They move in and out of bay flats, mangroves, and oyster reefs in the first three years of their life cycle.

Once they become adults, they move out to the Gulf.

Redfish will grow close to two feet and six to eight pounds by three years of age and put up a heck of a fight.

Fishing guide Chuck Naiser has seen anglers' pursuit of redfish increase in popularity over the years, and that demand has become a problem.

- I started coming to Rockport in 1967.

It's ridiculous to say this, but it was so different in the lack of people out here, the vast open spaces that were undisturbed.

It's something that really just took control of me.

I started guiding in 1992, and going out every day.

And so I would go home at night and replay what happened.

What did I learn?

What did I see?

In '92, I compared what I saw then to what was here in 1967, and features were missing.

The big question I'd ask myself at two o'clock in the morning, if I saw this in 1967, and it's different, what did the Indians see?

My God, what a paradise this was without highlines, horns, people.

I mean, it had to be just this glorious environment that has evolved out over time.

I just got hyper interested in the evolution of this habitat.

I saw fish that you can't see anymore.

I saw features that you can't see anymore.

And you know, you don't wanna be bitter about it, I mean, nothing ever stays the same, it goes up or it goes down.

I could either sit by idly and say nothing, or I could attempt to bring it to the attention of the public and try to encourage people to be stewards of this environment.

- [Jay] To that end, Chuck founded Flatsworthy, a nonprofit that tries to guide fellow anglers to respect each other and their shared resource.

- It was brought about as a result of watching years of bad behavior on the water develop and become more prominent.

Something had to be done.

So, 12 of us got together in a meeting, and I challenged them.

I said, "What are we gonna do?

Are y'all happy with what's going on?"

The answer was no.

And I said, "Well, what are we gonna do about it?"

And so we decided to speak out and to be heard.

This was a world-class fishery.

I do not think it is now.

I think that that's due to the evolution of some of our fishing grounds, the influx of people, which I'm not against, I'm not, but the behavior has changed this place.

And what was once peaceful and serene, the fish are not left alone.

I mean, it's just not what it was.

- [Chrissy] The same could be said of fish habitat, like oyster reefs.

It can take decades for a reef to recover from environmental stress or dredging.

In 2021, oysters weren't recovering fast enough in Texas bays, which caused Texas Parks and Wildlife to close all but 17 of its 28 public reefs to harvest.

That season, commercial oyster fishermen descended upon the fishing grounds in Chuck's backyard.

As Chuck and others saw it, the foundations of the fishery were under attack.

The public reefs west of Matagorda Island, an area that represents 3% of the total oyster habitat in Texas, accounted for 30% of the state's commercial harvest in the 2021 season.

A true tragedy of the commons.

Chuck and other anglers launched a public campaign to prevent what he called the strip mining of the bays.

As a result, in November of 2022, Texas Parks and Wildlife Department permanently closed the public oyster reefs west of Matagorda Island to harvest.

By the start of the 2023 season, only eight of the 28 public reefs remained open, giving the reefs that remained closed time to recover.

- [Jay] The changes Chuck has seen over his lifetime have him worried about the health of the coastal fishery and the effects humans have had on it.

As our state and climate change, Texans have to provide wildlife with the time and space to thrive.

This is a tall order for a state whose population grew more than any others in 2023, and is expected to add an additional 3 to 5 million residents by 2036.

- [Chrissy] South of Mustang Island, we crossed Packery Channel on a borrowed kayak.

(gentle music) And so we entered Padre Island, the longest barrier island in the world, where we made some new friends.

Just to the west, and occasionally in sight for us, lies the Laguna Madre, a hypersaline bay with clear, shallow waters, perfect for shoalgrass, a staple for wintering waterfowl.

One such species, the redhead, breeds across the vast prairies of the continent, but nearly the entire population winters in South Texas.

Scientists are still learning about the ecological importance of this relatively undeveloped part of the Texas coast.

- We're standing here on the lower Texas coast, probably one of the more important bird migration corridors in the world.

It connects a lot of North America to South America, so there's a lot of migrants that move into, we're talking passarines and all other species, that follow the coastline down into South America.

So this is a hugely important migration corridor for birds.

During fall migration, a lot of the birds from eastern parts of North America actually fly a circum-Gulf migration, so they come around, they don't wanna fly over the Gulf.

It's dangerous, it's a long, long open body that has no stopover opportunities, right?

So there's no place to land.

So we pack a lot of birds in fall along the Gulf Coast.

The Laguna Madre, which is behind us here, winters probably up to 80% of the continental population of redheads, one species that breeds throughout North America.

Even though they're distributed quite broadly during the breeding season, they're concentrated quite a lot in the wintering area here in the Laguna Madre, and they're here foraging on shoal grass, kind of the attributes of the Laguna here that make it really favorable for waterfowl.

The Laguna Madre has quite salty water.

It's at least as salty as the ocean, so, about 34 parts per thousand.

And sometimes can get hypersaline based on the amount of rainfall and evaporation and so forth.

You know, when evaporation exceeds rainfall and, you know, water coming in, then you can start getting hypersaline conditions.

And so the freshwater wetlands inland are critical for these birds.

They have to drink fresh water to maintain their salt concentrations in their blood, or to reduce that, dilute it, if you will.

And so they make daily flights inland to these freshwater ponds to drink, and then come back out to feed.

So it's a combination of both that make this a really critical place for redheads.

It wouldn't work if the freshwater ponds weren't here.

- [Jay] But the delicate balance of the hypersaline Laguna Madre, the coast, and the freshwater ponds could be upset by sea level rise and climate change.

- In terms of the future, we've done some modeling with sea level rise.

It's supposed to be a meter in the next 100 years.

It's gonna inundate a lot of land.

It's gonna take about 60% of these coastal ponds away.

They're gonna be inundated with salt water, so, unusable.

It's the freshwater that the birds need.

The thing we're not talking about is climate change, either.

You know, a lot of these species, their distributions are moving north.

So, blackbellied whistling ducks.

When I came here in 1990, the most northern distribution of the blackbelly whistling duck was Corpus Christi.

They're now breeding in North Dakota.

(gentle music) When you deal with migratory birds, there's no question whether climate change is real or not.

You see it in so many different species.

When you're talking about long distance migrants and species that have specific habitats that they're wintering in, in, like, South America, species here can respond to climate change 'cause they can see the progression of the onset of spring, and they can respond to it.

Species in South America can't see that up here, so they're triggered by cues like day length, that cues them that it's time to migrate.

Well, day length is the same.

It's not affected by climate change, right?

It's gonna be the same at the same days no matter what.

And so what we're seeing is a mismatch with long distance migrants.

So they're migrating back at the same time.

However, spring is earlier, and so they're mismatching resource availability.

As our population grows here in Texas, and it's gonna continue to grow by a long ways here, people are getting more and more disconnected with the natural world.

And so having this area down here, these big ranches that have a really good conservation effort, and most importantly are keeping large tracts of land contiguous, that's really critical for the integrity of this system.

And I don't think a lot of people understand that.

You know, we have a wildlife refuge down here that's, you know, we pay tax money, goes into benefiting, and we've got all these landowners down here that are doing them themselves and keeping these habitats in big contiguous tracts, and are holding as many species as any wildlife refuge, supporting as many species as any wildlife refuge in the lower coast.

(gentle music) - [Jay] Entering Padre Island National Seashore meant that there wasn't any development, and all there was was the beach.

And that was enough.

- [Chrissy] With fewer people, our walk became more meditative.

It gave us a chance to reflect on the beauty of the Texas coast, and how lucky we were to get to take this journey together.

(Chrissy chuckles) - [Jay] And it was, like, reassuring.

- Yeah, yeah, yeah.

- I know that you were thinking the same thing.

- Yeah.

These islands are jewels that adorn our coastline.

They're worth admiring, protecting, and celebrating.

- [Jay] Next time on "Chasing the Tide".

- 'Cause if you can get somebody to care about what's going on in the Gulf of Mexico, you get 'em to start trying to care for it and wanna protect it.

(upbeat music) - [Jay] Funding for this program was provided by... - [Chrissy] The J.W.

Couch Foundation.

- [Jay] Caesar Kleberg Wildlife Research Institute at Texas A&M University Kingsville.

- [Chrissy] Harte Research Institute for Gulf of Mexico Studies at Texas A&M University Corpus Christi.

- [Jay] The Gulf of Mexico Trust.

(upbeat music) - [Chrissy] Threshold Foundation.

- [Jay] Shield-Ayres Foundation.

- [Chrissy] Alice Kleberg Reynolds Foundation.

Gossamer Gear.

Cina Alexander Forgason.

Pam and Will Harte.

- [Jay] Helen Alexander, Blair and Wade G. Chappell, Claire Dewar, Cheryl and Paul Drown, Deborah and David McBride, Myfe Moore, Shirley and Dennis Rich, and the Texas Water Foundation.

- [Chrissy] For more information and a complete list of funders, please visit chasingthetideseries.com.

(gentle music)