Two years of below average rainfall in the local basin (40 inches for 2024 at Melbourne) has cut the nutrient load from runoff. Plankton community looks happy. No brown tide this year. Pyrodinium behaved itself. Oysters have struck all over the place in the cocoa Rockledge area and the young oysters are growing quickly.

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Butt. People are still fertilizing like crazy. We need rainy years to look like this year with good water clarity and hopefully a regrow of grass and oysters in general.

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Let's hope it returns. My son was on the river a few weeks ago and said there are still large swaths with nothing but algae on the bottom.

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I was right.

Edited: 01/10/2025 at 10:51 AM by Cole

Yeah. Nothing but algae round here. First oysters I've seen on rocks and pilings in the 12 years we've lived around here.

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The oyster experiment at the end of my street seems to the thriving, thought I'm not sure how one measures an oyster's happiness. The mangroves didn't hold, and that's concerning.

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I was right.

lots of oysters in the indialantic zone compared to a yr or two ago. sea walls are getting covered. nice to see.