Cleaner water on the half shell in North Palm

Volunteers gather to string together oyster shells to dangle beneath docks, revive aquatic life.

The sound of nearly 30 volunteers hammering oyster shells could be heard from the parking lot at Anchorage Park in North Palm Beach. 

Residents pounded holes with drills and punches in hardened, dried oyster shells collected from area restaurants and seafood shops.

They threaded the shells with steel cable to create a vertical oyster garden that can be suspended beneath docks.

They explained to children how their efforts would draw young oysters and barnacles to latch onto the surface and draw fish and other sea life to revive the cloudy water and dying seagrasses in canals winding through town.

They celebrated that North Palm Beach is the first municipality in Palm Beach County to create and distribute vertical oyster gardens. 

The effort is the work of the village’s Environmental Committee, which teamed with local firefighters and volunteers to build about 100 strings of oysters on Nov. 22.

They’ll offer the vertical oyster gardens to any resident who wants to place them beneath their dock and provide help installing them for those who need it.

“Our goal is to get as many in the water as possible,” committee Chairperson and former County Commissioner Karen Marcus said.

Shells come from The Breakers, Cod & Capers

Kendra Zellner, an avid paddleboarder and environmentalist and the committee’s secretary, said she first noticed trash and cloudy water in the canals years ago and saw the committee of like-minded people offered an opportunity to do something about it.

The vertical oyster gardens filter silt and pollutants from the water. They’re made from stacks of recycled oyster shells, and provide a place for oysters to latch onto to start filtering water. 

Area conservationist Tom Twyford, executive director of the West Palm Beach Fishing Club, collects shells from The Breakers resort in Palm Beach and Cod & Capers Seafood in North Palm. He deposits them to dry for about six months at John D. MacArthur Beach State Park. 

Once volunteers build vertical oyster gardens, they are immediately ready for oysters to latch onto.

Once they’re dropped in the water, the gardens become densely packed with live oysters, some doubling in weight in just six months. 

A living oyster can filter 50 gallons of water a day. Just 100 oysters clean 5,000 gallons of water a day, restoring the waterways that have gotten dirtier over the past few decades.

“We would love for the water to come from somewhere else, so it’s not dirty when it gets here,” said Marcus, a North Palm Beach native who served on the County Commission from 1984 to 2012. “The way the system is designed in the county, this is just the way the drainage is. I think there are attempts down the road to change that. But right now, we’re doing what we can do here locally.”

North Palm Beach could wait for the state government to allocate resources to this problem. “But at the end of the day, it’s going to take volunteers to get this done a lot quicker,” Zellner said.

Residents with docks can help

Committee members have lived in North Palm Beach from 10 to 40 years each. They say they are invested in cleaning the waterways for the enjoyment of residents, tourists and wildlife. 

In 2021, manatee deaths rose due to the loss of seagrass, their main nutrient source. The day before the event, Council member Orlando Puyol said, North Palm Beach saw a large influx of manatees in the canals around the village. 

Vertical oyster gardens have already proven useful in restoring wildlife populations, he said.

Zellner, Puyol, and the committee’s vice chair, Mary Phillips, are planning to reach out to residents this month to start installing the gardens. 

The West Palm Beach Fishing Club provides the oyster gardens outside of North Palm Beach. North Palm is also hoping to work with Jupiter, Tequesta and Palm Beach Gardens toward the same goal.

Other places across the country are making similar efforts. Tampa, Jacksonville, and even places in New York City have undergone similar efforts, with humpback whales returning to the city’s coastline after the progress of the Billion Oyster Project.

Mangrove islands could be coming to North Palm Beach as well. The Environmental Committee is planning on working with the Mang Brothers, West Palm-based founders of an initiative known as “Buy one. Plant one.” They want to create mangrove islands like the ones in Lake Worth Beach and West Palm Beach. 

The Mang Brothers have agreed to speak at a North Palm Environmental Committee event in January or February.