Richard Kline surveyed a patch of the Gulf of Mexico about 15 miles northeast of the South Padre Island jetties and found a mostly watery lifeless bottom. 

“There were almost no fish in that whole 2.5-square-mile area,” said Kline, a professor of marine sciences at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley. “Now, there are hundreds of thousands or more.”

The difference between back then – before 2015 – and today is the RGV Reef. The artificial reef has 72 million pounds of concrete and is the largest of its kind along the Texas coast. It is mostly constructed out of intentionally sunken vessels, rail ties and cinder blocks. The reef is proving itself to be a valuable habitat in providing shelter, food and cover for fish. It has created its own little world off the SPI coast.

It’s not only the fish life. The artificial reef is putting carbon back into the sentiments instead of releasing it into the atmosphere. This capturing and storing of carbon is known as carbon sequestration and it is believed to reduce greenhouse emissions. Assessing the RGV Reef’s effectiveness in creating fish life and containing carbon will be the focus of new research announced in early May.

A $250,000 grant from Enbridge Inc. will help fund a study to more precisely measure the fish population connected to the reef while gauging its capabilities in storing carbon. 

“We’ll do a lot of work to estimate the number of fish and organisms that are on the reef and how much carbon biomass we actually have,” Kline said. “I think this will be a fantastic study.”

Building A Reef

The reef’s beginnings trace back to some SPI residents and their concerns over diminishing fish populations off the southern Texas coast.

“We were wondering what happened to the fish of our youth,” Gary Glick said. “The seas were no longer speckled with these little boats of people setting up the next generation of conservationists.”

The way Glick sees it, the most passionate conservationists “are people who use it.” 

“When a fish pulls on the string of a little boy or a girl’s fishing pole, it pulls their heart strings,” he said. “We’re not going to have a generation who cares about our oceans in the future unless we have kids catching fish.”

Those sentiments would inspire Glick and a group of like-minded Island residents to form the non-profit Friends of Rio Grande Valley Reef in 2015. The funding the organization would secure through grants, foundations, fishing tournaments, conservation groups and local governments would lead to the construction of a 1,650-acre reef. The city of South Padre Island has been a significant donor, giving the project over $300,000 since its inception.

The results of those efforts and contributions are a large and complex artificial reef. It includes 4,000 tons of broken-up recycled concrete, 24,000 tons of recycled concrete railroad ties, and six sunken steel hull vessels. Adding to all of that are 94,000 cinder blocks and 3,000 tons of concrete culverts. Glick, the president of Friends of RGV Reef, said the industrial scale reef is the first of its kind to be attempted.

“It’s the first certainly in Texas, and biologists tell me it’s the first in the world,” Glick said at a May 9 event to announce the new study funded by Enbridge. “No one has done this before.”

Economic Impact

There is also an economic development component to the reef. 

Friends of RGV Reef lists $45.6 million of economic output and the generation of $3.6 million in state and local tax revenue. The reef is said to accrue nearly $14 million in income to local residents.

The reef has generated considerable community goodwill. Glick expressed his appreciation to the Port of Brownsville for providing a staging area for the reef material donations. It is from there that Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railway has donated hundreds of cars of recycled railroad ties that have been dropped into the Gulf waters to build up the reef. Cameron County via the office of Commissioner Sofia Benavides has donated tons of concrete from highway projects. 

“This thing works,” said Pete Sheffield of Enbridge, which is based in Calgary, Canada. “It has some unique partnerships. Now, Dr. Kline will take it to the next stage.”

Kline will do so via the new study and research that will include assistance from undergraduate and graduate students from UTRGV. He is excited to get a better idea of how the complex world of the reef works.

“We know we have a lot of hard structure on the bottom there,” he said. “We’ll get a much better idea of the density of fish per reef and also have an idea which materials are doing the best in determining how well the reef is helping to reduce carbon emissions.”