This is what your brilliant jindal accomplished.......because the guy panicked like a little girl confronted with her first spider, LA lost more oyster beds from fresh water than the oil spill.
Brilliant! Just brilliant!
Gulf oyster beds could start rebounding in fall
Updated 2h 21m ago
By Elizabeth Weise, USA TODAY
Here's what sounds like a riddle but isn't: Louisiana lost somewhere between 20% and 50% of its oyster beds because of the Deepwater Horizon disaster — but 0% because of the resulting oil spill.
In a case of destroying one thing to preserve a greater good, Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, a Republican, in May ordered the opening of freshwater diversions from the Mississippi River to push any oil out to sea and keep it from fouling critical marshes.
Those diversions are in the process of being turned off, and oyster biologists are hopeful that this fall's spawning season will be fruitful. But because too much fresh water can kill off oyster beds, it will still take about two years for the oyster beds to return to full production.
At its height, more than 15,000 cubic feet per second of Mississippi River water was released over and under and through levees, funneling fresh water from the river into marshlands, says Rusty Gaude with the Louisiana Sea Grant Program in Belle Chasse, La.
The tactic worked in that most oyster beds weren't oiled, says Harlon Pearce, chairman of the Louisiana Seafood Promotion and Marketing Board. But it resulted in thousands of acres of prime oyster beds in Louisiana's southeast being covered with fresh water for weeks.
Oysters can survive only in brackish water, half the salinity of seawater. Left in fresh water too long, they die.
The good news is that the oysters that survived are "ripe," ready to release eggs and sperm that will meet in the water and form oyster larvae, says John Supan, director of the Louisiana State University Sea Grant Bivalve Hatchery on Grand Isle, La.
Fresh water inhibits spawning, so as the waters over the beds once again turn brackish, the oysters should start reproducing. About two weeks later, the free-swimming larvae should turn into spats, baby-fingernail-size oysters, which attach to a hard surface. Two years later, they'll be ready for harvest.
"I'm looking forward to a good fall set, and then the recovery will begin," Supan says.
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The Louisiana Oyster Task Force is hoping to make it even easier for the baby oysters. It has sent a letter asking for recovery money to be spent to "till" the oyster banks, raking the surface of the reefs to dislodge algae and any dirt, exposing clean, hard surfaces for the spats to attach to.
It's "a very beneficial process to help restore a dead reef," says John Tesvich, chairman of the task force.
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