All Hands on Deck for Georgia Fisheries

At Georgia’s Sapelo Island Reserve, the estuary hums with life. Red drum, blue crab, and white shrimp (which alone bring in $121.1 million every year) rely on these protected waters as nurseries. For Georgia communities that depend on fisheries, understanding how to manage these fragile habitats is a critical need. To address that, the Reserve has launched a series of projects to collect vital data, train the next generation of scientists, and deepen local stewardship of the region’s fisheries. Collectively, this work is mapping out a vision for resilient fisheries and communities along Georgia’s coast.

It started with a need for data about the fish themselves. How many are there? Where do they go? How do they change? Answering such questions is expensive, logistically difficult, and more than one organization can manage alone. That’s why the Reserve and partners including the University of Georgia Marine Extension, Georgia Sea Grant, College of Coastal Georgia, University of Georgia Marine Institute, and University of Georgia- Warnell School of Forestry and Natural Resources formed the Estuarine Fish Monitoring Cooperative (EFMC).

By pooling their resources, EFMC partners have been able to conduct monthly trawls at 33 stations in the estuary since 2021. Each haul is sorted, identified, measured, and returned to the water. The result is a long-term dataset that they hope will guide fisheries management in the future. 

“With fish monitoring, there’s a lot of variability in the data from year to year, so it’s important to have several years of data before you begin to explore long-term patterns,” says Rachel Guy, Reserve manager and Co-PI of the EFMC. “By the end of 2025, we hope to explore questions like how rainfall patterns affect shrimp harvests or how big storms or periods of droughts shift species in the estuaries.”

The EFMC is training the next generation of scientists to continue this work. Undergraduate interns, graduate researchers, and local students are all gaining hands-on experience in field methods, fish identification, and data analysis through trainings with the Reserve. This information is also available to educators to use in classrooms, giving their students the opportunity to work with real-world, local data. 

“Over time, we were able to frame this as an educational opportunity for training local coastal scientists and start building up a bench of people who could do this,” says Guy,

One challenge? Identifying juvenile fish. Interpreting the monitoring data depends on it, yet these young, often translucent fish are notoriously difficult to tell apart. Guy realized existing guides weren’t enough to help students, anglers, or even seasoned scientists ID the fish.

Bait fish.

That insight inspired What’s My Bait?, a project designed to demystify juvenile fish—often just called “bait fish”—for anglers and the public. Through illustrated guides, videos, and fishermen testimonials, the project is helping local Georgia residents recognize the biodiversity around them, reframing estuaries as living nurseries where every species plays a role rather than just places to fish. The project was funded by the NERRSScience Collaborative.

These efforts are threads in a larger tapestry. By combining science, outreach, and storytelling, the Reserve is helping ensure that estuaries continue to sustain local economies and cultural identity for generations to come.