Reef Madness.

• Author: Bailey, Ronald
• Position: Fishermen's use of artificial reefs to improve fisheries

How Alabama fishermen are repopulating the sea.

Ecologically speaking, Alabama is one of the least likely locations for a thriving game-fish population, or "fishery" in the technical jargon. The very same sparkling white sands that attract sun worshipers to the Camellia State's Gulf Coast stretch for scores of miles offshore. For game fish, that featureless sandy bottom is an underwater desert that provides little food or shelter.

Yet the waters just off Alabama boast one of the nation's most robust red snapper populations. Comprising just 5 percent of the Gulf of Mexico's U.S. coastline, Alabama's tiny section of beachfront nonetheless produces between 30 and 40 percent of all the red snapper recreationally caught in the Gulf. Precisely how this came to be is no accident of nature: It is a testament to human ingenuity and innovation-and it provides one model for repopulating the planet's rapidly depleting fisheries.

What is Alabama's secret? Artificial reefs.

The state's gulf waters are home to the largest concentration of artificial reefs in the world. The reefs act as fish nurseries, creating populations in an otherwise barren seascape. Nearly 14,000 artificial reefs have been placed in a 1,200 square-mile area off two major tourist towns, Orange Beach and Gulf Shores, which are visited regularly by game-fishers looking to reel in a prize catch. The Orange Beach Chamber of Commerce estimates that its game-fishing charter fleet of more than 100 boats pumps around $90 million a year into the local economy. "It's a very, very successful program," says Robert Shipp, head of the Marine Sciences Department at the University of Alabama at Mobile.

Fishers learned long ago that they could find fish living around shipwrecks and other underwater debris. Beginning in 1953, the state of Alabama officially permitted fishers to make their own sea-floor structures by dumping things like car bodies, old tires, refrigerators, clothes washers, and even shopping carts offshore. It worked. "I often say scientists just kind of follow fishermen and put a little stamp of approval on the common sense that the fishermen have developed over the years," says Hal Osburn, director of the Coastal Fisheries Division at the Texas Department of Parks and Wildlife. "Without the artificial reefs in Alabama, we wouldn't have any fish to fish," says David Walter of The Reefmaker, a company that manufactures, sells, and deploys artificial reefs.

The new generation of artificial reefs avoids the downside to using "materials of opportunity"-the junked cars and the shopping carts used 40 years ago.

Shrimpers' nets often were destroyed by being dragged across unmarked reefs. (The shrimpers complained, and in 1987 the Alabama Department of Conservation and Natural Resources worked with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which has jurisdiction over coastal waters, to designate a large permit area for artificial-reef creation.) Another problem with using junk for reefs is that salt water corrodes and destroys many structures within just a few years. Storms would regularly...