08/14/2019
I'm so interested in this and look forward to creating our own mini reef system under our docks to clean the water and support an abundance of sealife right in my back yard!!! 🦀🐙🦐🐠🐟🌏💧
Fun Fact!
Thousands of tiny sea creatures — filtering water and attracting fish — grow on artificial reefs underneath docks in Marco Island.
Beginning decades ago, thousands of acres in Florida were transformed with dredge-and-fill operations that created canals to maximize waterfront development. These canals provide homeowners with easy water access to our diverse waterways, but the docks, bulkheads and seawalls don’t provide the same habitat values and water quality benefits as our salt marshes and mangroves.
Typically canals have poor water quality because of the surrounding land uses and a lack of tidal flushing, so they’re devoid of the wildlife expected to thrive in marshes and mangroves. But because the canals are lined with expensive waterfront homes, restoring natural habitats would be nearly impossible.
Such was the challenge facing David Wolff, who had worked on an artificial reef as a USF marine biology undergrad in the 1990s. At the time, the focus was cleaning water for the aquaculture industry, but when he retired after a successful career in real estate, Wolff revived the technology to re-create habitats in the “biological deserts” of canals found along Florida’s coast.
Today, his not-for-profit Ocean Habitats, Inc. has installed hundreds of habitats under docks and in canals in Marco Island, Naples, Fort Myers and Stuart, and is now looking at expanding into the Tampa Bay region. These new habitat features are constructed of fiberglass, PVC pipe, polypropylene rope and crab-trap floats. For most customers, however, cleaner water is just a side benefit to the number and diversity of fish attracted to once-barren habitats that hosted mainly catfish with an occasional sheepshead prior to the habitat installation.
The mini-reefs function much like the mangrove systems that originally lined Florida’s coast, providing places for filter-feeders to attach and small fish to hide. The small fish, in turn, attract larger fish. Filter-feeders like sea squirts move in shortly after the systems are installed; in three years the habitats reach peak efficiency with oysters and other filter feeders.
https://oceanhabitatsinc.com/blogs/news/artificial-reefs-create-habitat-in-once-barren-canals
