Engineer: Oyster growth will help protect coast

Oysters are vital to the survival of south Louisiana’s coastline, and engineer Tyler Ortego has a product that allows oysters to grow and provide a barrier to fight coastal erosion, he says.
Ortego was the guest speaker at Wednesday’s St. Mary Chamber of Commerce Business Luncheon at the Petroleum Club of Morgan City.
Ortego is one of the patent holders for OysterBreak and OysterKrete products, which are meant to protect the coastline by growing oysters. Ortego works for Wayfarer Environmental Technologies based in New Iberia.
OysterBreak is a concrete ring design that allows sediment buildup to protect the coast. The rings are like “big, round Legos” that are 5 feet in diameter and weigh 1,400 pounds each, Ortego said.
OysterKrete is a porous concrete conducive to the attachment of oysters, creating a so-called living shoreline, Michael Turley, owner of Wayfarer Environmental, told The Daily Review in April 2014.
Instead of having to build a rock structure to protect the coast, which may grow a few oysters, and then having to build an oyster reef designed at protecting the oyster species, OysterBreak can achieve both objectives, Ortego said.
Wayfarer’s product is replacing rock in many coastal protection projects due to the dual benefits of the product, Ortego said.
Oysters are “pretty amazing creatures,” Ortego said. A couple dozen make a good meal, but a couple of hundred thousand or a couple of million make “something transformative,” Ortego said.
Artificial oyster reefs can prevent coastal erosion.
Ortego and other engineers developed OysterBreak and OysterKrete in 2005 while students at LSU.
They designed the product specifically to be able to sit on Louisiana’s soft wetland soils, he said.
Wayfarer currently has an OysterBreak project in the works to install the rings at Point Chevreuil on the St. Mary Parish coastline, Turley said.
However, Wayfarer isn’t using OysterKrete because oysters cannot grow at Point Chevreuil due to the amount of freshwater there, Ortego said.
Nearly all of south Louisiana, including the Atchafalaya region, is considered an estuary, where freshwater meets the sea, he said. Oyster reefs are the foundation of the entire ecosystem in the estuary.
The artificial reefs provide nursery grounds for shrimp and crabs and habitat for other organisms to live around and colonize, Ortego said.
Oysters have been described as the “temperate equivalent of corral” both for their importance to the ecosystem and because they’re in drastic decline across the world, Ortego said.
Eighty-five percent of the world’s oysters are now extinct and almost 100 percent of the large, three-dimensional reefs have disappeared.
Without oysters, the coastline is losing their physically protective mass, Ortego said.
Many studies on the importance of restoring coasts across the globe are showing the need for prevention and also stressing the need for “robust, natural features, especially coastal wetlands and living reefs as a first line of defense for coastal resiliency,” Ortego said.
Ortego believes the “next round” of Wayfarer’s coastal protection projects the company will build will come from Restore Act funds.
Wayfarer’s first artificial reef project was built in 2010 at the Paul J. Rainey Wildlife Sanctuary in Vermilion Parish, Turley said.
Wayfarer has completed other projects in Vermilion Parish and at Joshua’s Marina in Buras, Ortego said.
Wayfarer constructed an artificial reef for the Nature Conservancy in Biloxi, Mississippi, which Ortego is excited about. The company has more project opportunities in Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama, Ortego said.
Turley, who is from Chesapeake, Maryland, and now lives in New Iberia, met Ortego and the other LSU engineering students developing OysterBreak and OysterKrete in 2005. That meeting eventually led to Wayfarer acquiring the license for the OysterBreak and OysterKrete products, Turley said.'

This story was written by Zachary Fitzgerald of The Daily Review staff. Reach him at zfitzgerald@daily-review.com.