Over the past two decades the oyster population in Mississippi's Gulf waters

has been devastated by natural and man-made disasters including Hurricane Katrina

and the Deepwater Horizon Oil spill.

Among those working to restore oyster habitats called oyster reefs

is a ninth grader named Demi Johnson.

The National Geographic Society recently recognized her work over the past two years, growing more

than 1,000 oysters, and those oysters are likely to spawn millions more in the years to come.

Recently I spoke with Demi and asked her what goes into an oyster farm.

First you obviously oysters and you need a pier to do it off of and you need cages and you need to be able to do weekly maintenance on these

oysters. What does it take to sort of raise oysters? I mean you don't you

don't plant them you don't put them in the

crown like seeds how does it work? So you're gonna put oysters in a cage and

then you're going to have a rope and you're going to tie it to the outside part of a pier and naturally if you were to drop these cages in while they're tied up they're going to be just kind of in the water. Honestly, when it comes to like maintaining you're

taking care of once a week is fine just to shake the cages and to get the

critters out because they are seen as a food source to other animals.

Once I'm done with the oyster gardening, they are dumped out into another area and they start to become their own reef.

How did you get started in this? How did you get interested in it?

So I found out about this through my Girl Scout troop, simply from my Girl Scout leader.

So there's a thing called a silver award and you have to do a project for your community, something community base.

And she just kind of put it up in the air.

She was like, hey, you can do Oyster gardening at my pier.

And I was like, okay, I'll do it.

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