These ancient shells are crucial to understanding the decline of modern oyster reefs throughout the Florida Panhandle and to restoring this vital habitat. Via atlasobscura
, has not come to harvest the living assemblage of eastern oysters poking above the water. He’s here to sample the dead shells entombed below.’s Department of Environmental Protection to collect tens of thousands of oyster fossils from reefs like this one. The work is about more than paleontology: These ancient shells are crucial to understanding the decline of modern oyster reefs throughout the Florida Panhandle and to restoring this vital habitat.
Which is why the conservationists turned to an unlikely ally: paleontologists. “It’s the only way possible to answer these questions,” Dietl says. The gray, fossilized oyster shells, rough and often stippled with barnacles, don’t look like much, but collectively they preserve decades-worth of crucial data. The researchers were particularly interested in how oyster size had shifted over the course of the fishery’s collapse. According to Durham, the size of an oyster’s shell can tell you how fast the animal grew, how long it lived, and how it responded to changes in water quality during its lifetime, among other information.
Dietl’s Historical Oyster Body Size Project is just one of several projects in the burgeoning field of conservation paleobiology, where fossil data informs modern conservation efforts. Karl Flessa, a geologist at the University of Arizona who has worked with Dietl on other projects, likens the effort to “putting the dead to work.”
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