About a dozen Pinellas County employees stacked mesh bags of oyster shells along the sandy shore of Philippe Park in Safety Harbor on Monday.
The living shorelines initiative was one of many service projects across the county as part of its "in-service day."
"It's recycled oyster shell from local restaurants," said Stacey Day, the environment program manager who led a team of about a dozen environmental management workers.
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They dropped 65 feet worth of oysters in front of mangroves on either side of the kayak launch area.
"We're just trying to help protect what's already here,” Day said. “The mangroves do a great job. You can see these roots poking up. They hold the sediment. They also capture all this loose shell. And so, we'll get oysters growing up in those roots.”
The shells will continue to grow while live oysters attach to them and create a natural barrier for wave action and storms.
The department is seeing promising results from an oyster reef they installed just offshore of their current project a few years ago.
It’s also mesh bags filled with loose shells, but they float together in the water to make a ring shape.
Day said oysters are growing like crazy out there.
"It's really exciting to see. And you know, each adult oyster can filter a lot of water … up to 50 gallons a day," Day said.
And they've noticed more seagrasses growing on the backside of the reef.
"If you see healthy seagrass, that's usually healthy water," Day said.
The oyster ring was put to the test during the 2024 storms, and Day said it didn't move at all.
"The road was completely covered with sand and water. They lost a lot of pine trees during the storms ... but this reef here did help kind of break up some of that wave energy,” she said.
“So, without that being there, we might have seen more trees lost just because the waves would have been more powerful."
