This plump oyster is six months old. Grown in the cages, the oysters develop a perfect cup, ready for the market.

Here is a plan to save Mobile Bay.

It starts with the simplest component of the ecosystem, the oyster, and will, in one fell swoop, begin to right a century's worth of wrongs we have inflicted on our precious estuary. We begin with the oyster because it is the keystone species in our system - when things are right with our oysters, things are right with everything else.

But our oysters are not right. Most of our native reefs are gone. We destroyed them either willfully, by overharvest, or inadvertently, through habitat destruction and the effects of the annual dead zones that now set up in Mobile Bay, just like the giant Gulf of Mexico dead zone off Louisiana that appears every summer. Scientists believe we no longer have enough oysters tOyo successfully repopulate the bay each year.

This series: Can 100 trillion oyster eggs save Mobile Bay?

To restore the natural balance, we propose a sort of sexual revolution in our waters. We seek to restore the critical spawning mass of oysters in our estuary so that the natural reefs may begin to repopulate, and new reefs can appear. Our goal is to produce five million spawning oysters a year, cultivating and coddling

them so as to maximize their spawning potential. Those oysters will filter 250 million gallons of water a day, and 91 billion gallons a year. Most importantly, those oysters will release about 100 trillion eggs per year. One hundred trillion baby oysters potentially launched into the wild. Every year.

This tiny grass shrimp clings to a feeding oyster. Oyster reefs provide critical nursery habitat for all manner of sealife.

This is a massive undertaking, to be sure, but we believe we have come up with a novel and practical way to do it. The "we" in this case includes me, Ben Raines, and Andy DePaola, recently retired from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration as one of the world's leading experts in food-borne pathogens, particularly those associated with oysters. We hatched this plan eating oysters on DePaola's dock, oysters that he raised in cages suspended beneath the very same dock. His experiences there have guided our efforts and serve as our demonstration site.

We have already presented our idea to the Alabama Department of Conservation and Natural Resources and the state Health Department. Representatives from both have visited our demonstration site and support our proposal. Scientists with the Dauphin Island Sea Lab and are interested in monitoring the spawning success and growth rates of the project, which we have submitted for a National Fish and Wildlife Grant, funded by the BP oil spill settlement.

Accomplishing our goal will require the participation of hundreds of folks who live around the bay, and a coalition of non-profit entities willing to take on this mightiest of tasks. But this is a fix that is within reach, and similar in some respects to restoration efforts undertaken in other places. There is no reason it can't be done here. And every reason it should be done here.

The salient facts about oysters are well documented. An adult oyster can filter and clean about 50 gallons of water a day. Their reefs are the critical component in our coastal system, providing a natural breakwater that protects soft and vulnerable marshland, and a home to about 300 species of crabs, shrimp, fish, worms and other creatures. They are good to eat.

The most important facts about Mobile Bay's oysters are less well known. Here they are: 1. After a century's worth of almost totally unrestricted harvest, we have eaten most of our oysters.

2. Many of our largest historical reefs have disappeared entirely, due to either overharvest, becoming buried in sediment, or the mining of shells for use in concrete (yes, we truly and catastrophically allowed our bay to be mined for road-making material, even after the practice was banned in other states).

3. We no longer have a critical mass of oysters large enough for successful spawning in most of the bay, meaning our native reefs continue to dwindle and face an ever more dire future.

Before we get to the nuts and bolts of our plan, a bit about oyster biology is required. Oysters, like many sea creatures, engage in "broadcast spawning," which means the males and females release their eggs and milt into the water at the same time, and fertilization occurs in the water column. This requires a bit of luck and good timing among the oysters so they all spawn at the same time. It also requires a lot of oysters. Otherwise, if there are too few oysters, the chances of an egg meeting a sperm and becoming a larva that grows into an adult oyster are exponentially smaller.

That's the position we find ourselves in on Mobile Bay. We have lost so many of our native reefs that successful spawning occurs almost exclusively on the remnant oyster reefs of Cedar Point around the Dauphin Island Bridge, and nowhere else. As a consequence, we are seeing baby oysters around Cedar Point and in the Mississippi Sound, and not too many other locations.

But that's not how things used to be! In fact, as recently as a decade or two ago, oysters would routinely pop up by the hundreds on pilings and rocks around Pt. Clear, fifteen miles away, or around Brookley Air Field, or in Bon Secour Bay, or near the mouth of Fowl River. And those locations supported large and viable reefs, some harvested commercially for the better part of a century before they finally disappeared. The key point is this: Mobile Bay used to support large oyster reefs spread all around, which -- before we destroyed them -- churned out trillions of larval oysters every year, constantly repopulating our reefs and shorelines north, south, east and west with new generations.

This same downward spiral happened in Maryland's Chesapeake Bay several decades ago. That bay's oysters were overharvested until the spawning collapsed completely and the bay was shut to commercial harvest. With the oyster population reduced to one percent of its historic size, there simply weren't enough oysters left to repopulate the reefs every year. The loss of the oyster reefs set off an ecosystem-wide cascade of failures, which ultimately decimated Maryland's famous blue crab harvest.

Mobile Bay shows signs of being on the cusp of the same type of disaster.

The good news is they've begun to turn things around in the Chesapeake through aggressive effort over many years. We think we have come up with a way to turn things around in Mobile Bay much more quickly, before our situation gets any worse.

What's more, we think our plan can serve as a model that can be spread to estuaries all around the Gulf. There is not an estuary anywhere on the Gulf that wouldn't benefit from an increase in the number of spawning oysters, and here we provide a practical way to accomplish that goal.

The Plan

At first blush, most people think the best way to recreate our native reefs and restore our spawning population of oysters would be to simply throw baby oysters into the water at various locations and let nature take its course. Experience, however, has proven that won't work. At least not here. The state has tried planting with baby oysters several times in recent years, but the results have been disappointing. Largely because Mobile Bay is overrun with a predatory snail known as the oyster drill. Tiny baby oysters scattered on the seafloor were simply a readymade delicacy for the drills, which made short work of them.

Likewise in 2007 when the state tried to "relocate" an existing and ancient oyster reef from the top of the bay to the site of the old White House reef, south of Fowl River. Oystermen spent a month tonging up millions of adult oysters and moving them to the new location. Sadly, within a matter of weeks, they were all dead. Not only did we lose those oysters, but the reef they were plucked from was largely destroyed in the process.

The problem then was that the spot where they placed the oysters, on top of an old reef, was no longer suitable. It has since been shown to be one of the locations where the Mobile Bay dead zone sets up in the summer. Ultimately, these low oxygen areas - the cause of our famous jubilee phenomenon - are now so persistent in many areas, no life can survive. Other locations, such as Point Clear and Bon Secour, are no longer suitable for oysters because the bottom sediments, after decades of the shell mining program, are too soft to support a reef.

We are caught in a sort of feedback loop, where to solve some of the problems in the bay, such as the excess nutrient levels that cause the low oxygen problems, we need oysters. But oysters can't survive because we've thrown things so out of balance and wrecked the places they like to live. To kickstart the system, we need to cultivate millions of oysters, and coddle them until they can spawn.

Suspended by ropes, dozens of cages full of oyster hang below Andy Depaola's pier just south of Fowl River on Mobile Bay.

So here is our plan: we propose to use existing residential piers around the bay as platforms to grow oysters. We have a demonstration site on the western shore of the bay, where for the last three years we have been growing 50,000 oysters under a single 400-foot long pier. The oysters are grown in closed baskets that hang beneath the pier on ropes. We start with seed oysters the size of an aspirin pill. About 5,000 of them will fit in one of the specially designed baskets at first. Within a month, they have quadrupled in size. After that, they roughly double in size every three weeks. By six months, the oysters are so large that we can only fit about 125 in each of the baskets that once held thousands. Now they are ready to begin spawning, which they do twice a year.

Trapped in close proximity in the baskets, the success rate for fertilization is maximized, with 50,000 oysters going off at the same time under each pier. We plan to locate our oyster piers up and down the bay on both the eastern and western shores, so that when the spawn happens, it happens everywhere, filling the water with larvae.

After our crop has spawned twice, we will give most of the 5 million oysters raised each year to the state Marine Resources division to be used to restock our remaining native reefs. A small portion of the oysters raised will be given to the owners of the docks used in the projects. The oysters that are placed on reefs should be left alone to continue spawning.

That way, we will increase our spawning biomass exponentially, year over year. Imagine, the first year of our project, we will have an additional 5 million oysters spawning in the bay. Then, the next year, we'd have the five million we grew the first year, plus the babies that survived from the first 100 trillion eggs released, plus the current year crop of spawners at the docks. As you can see, by the time five years have passed, we've added at lease 25 million adult oysters to the bay just with what we've grown at the piers. Then on top of that, we've released hundreds of trillions of eggs into the water that wouldn't have otherwise have been there, and hopefully grown tens of millons more wild oysters.

Auburn University's Shellfish Laboratory has been conducting a small-scale version of our proposal for several years, in its Oyster Gardening Program. While that effort raises tens of thousands of oysters a year, we aim to turbocharge our effort to get to our goal of 5 million annually.

No eunuchs allowed

If you are familiar with the various commercial oyster farming projects going on around the bay, parts of our plan sound familiar. In essence, we are relying on a slightly modified version of the techniques used in the oyster aquaculture industry, both here and around the world. But the modifications are the key to our proposal. They are the secret to our ability to grow so many oysters in tight quarters with relatively limited manpower.

Our proposal differs in critical aspects from commercial aquaculture operations. First and foremost, we will not be using sterile oysters. Almost all of the oysters being raised by the farms are genetically altered to be sterile, meaning they cannot spawn, and cannot help restore our native reefs. Being sterile helps them grow to market size more quickly, important if you are raising oysters as a cash crop. These muscle-bound eunuchs filter water, to be sure, and that is a great thing. But they cannot help repopulate our native reefs.

For our proposal, we plan to use only natural, unadulterated oysters. By the time they are a year old, each female can produce tens of millions of eggs.

Second, by using the piers, we solve the manpower issue that hamstrings farm production around the bay. The farms are forced to work out in open water, shepherding the oysters by boat. This is a huge obstacle to the kind of large scale production we envision, and is limited by weather, water depth and other issues.

Oysters raised in captivity require a lot of attention, largely because they grow so quickly. For instance, oysters in a cage must be divided every three weeks or so, and split into two separate cages due to their explosive growth rate. Likewise the cages must be suspended out of the water for 24 hours every week in order to kill algae, barnacles, and any of the aforementioned oyster drills that might have slipped into the cage.

Using our system, we can manage between 25,000 and 50,000 oysters under a single pier. Those oysters will require about 12 hours of labor a month for the splitting and weekly removal from the water. A team of six people can manage about a million oysters a year. Our plan is to aim for a million oysters the first year, and then ramp up to our goal of five million as quickly as possible.

Here Depaola's patented invention, the Shellevator, rises up from the bottom. Farmed oysters must be raised from the water once a week to kill fowling organisms such as barnacles and algae.

We have another innovative tool in our arsenal that is just coming on line. Andy has invented a device called the "Shellevator." It is a labor-saving device that we believe has the potential to revolutionize the oyster farming industry. Essentially, the Shellevator is a submersible platform for growing oysters. It can support about 5,000 oysters in racks of cages. It has several advantages over any of the current methods used for oyster farming.

First, much of the manpower involved in growing oysters is tied up in the labor required to physically lift the heavy cages of oysters from the water once a week. The Shellevator makes short work of that task, relying on compressed air to raise 5,000 oysters with the push of a button, rather than manually pulling up a couple hundred cages.

Second, the Shellevator is portable. Once it is filled with air and raised up on its pontoons, it can be towed short distances by a person in a kayak, even carrying 5,000 oysters. Several Shellevators can be tied together in a train and hauled great distances with a motorboat, moving 30,000 to 50,000 oysters from one side of the bay to the other in a matter of hours.

We think we can maximize our efforts around the bay with a combination of oysters suspended beneath piers and raised on Shellevators.

To make our plan work, we suggest harnessing the power of the Americorps volunteer program. Americorps was envisioned as a Peace Corps program aimed for domestic use, rather than international. Within Americorps, there is a division of environmental volunteers. For the most part, these are people who have just graduated from college and volunteer to work for an environmental group for a year in exchange for a reduction in their student loan debt.

The volunteers are paid a stipend by the federal government, which includes health insurance and a meager salary. For our program, we envision training the volunteers in all aspects of oyster husbandry, from spawning them at the Shellfish Laboratory on Dauphin Island, to raising the young oysters and then tending the cages as they grow. We think a squad of about 25 Americorps volunteers could manage our 5 million oysters growing under the piers of Mobile Bay.

At the end of each year, we would have raised five million oysters, spawned millions of new, wild oysters, and trained a new crop of young people who could then go to work in the burgeoning field of oyster farming.

It will take a radical change to turn the tide in Mobile Bay. We think our plan is just what the oyster doctor ordered.

Coming Wednesday: How Mobile Bay lost its oysters

Ben Raines specializes in investigations and natural wonders. You can follow him on Facebook, Twitter at BenHRaines, and on Instagram. You can reach him via email at braines@al.com.

You can watch Ben's documentary, the The Underwater Forest, here on Youtube.