AUSTIN, Texas >> Higher wholesale prices for freshly harvested oysters have Austin-area restaurants and seafood counters shelling out more for the popular bivalves these days — one of Hurricane Harvey’s few lingering repercussions on the local seafood market.

Area distributors braced for Harvey-induced shortages of many varieties of seafood from the Texas Gulf Coast last year, after the hurricane grounded and in some cases sank fishing boats and caused millions of dollars worth of fresh catch to spoil when refrigerated coastal storage facilities lost power.

Damages and lost revenue incurred by the state’s commercial fishing and processing industry have been pegged at nearly $50 million, according to an initial government assessment of the storm.

But about six months after the storm made landfall on Aug. 25 near Rockport, seafood lovers in Austin are having few problems finding their favorite Texas-caught entrees on local menus, and prices are largely back to normal, according to representatives of the local seafood sector.

“There were definitely some hiccups” in the weeks after the hurricane, said Steven Curtis, president and co-owner of Austin Seafood Products, a wholesale distributor to restaurants and grocery stores in Austin, Dallas and San Antonio.

Since the initial disruption, however, availability has improved and “been pretty consistent,” Curtis said. “You’re not going to be paying drastically higher prices than in a normal year.”

Carol Huntsberger, owner of Quality Seafood Market, agreed, saying the shortages were temporary and prices are in line with traditional seasonal trends. Quality Seafood operates a restaurant and retail counter, and it also is a seafood wholesaler.

“I would say most everything has been steady,” said Huntsberger, who prepared for the storm in part by ordering extra black drum out of Baffin Bay in advance of it, as well as by buying mahi mahi, snapper and swordfish from Costa Rica to supplement her seafood stocks. “Things are pretty much back to normal.”

But oysters are an exception. Wholesale oyster prices statewide have been on the rise because of the toll that Harvey took on many Gulf oyster beds.

Texas fisherman reaped an average of $6.20 per pound for oyster meat in December, based on a calculation that doesn’t include the weight of the shells. That’s up 15 percent from the comparable year-ago period and is the highest price on record since the data was first collected in 1972, according to the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department.

Lance Robinson, deputy coastal fisheries director for the state wildlife agency, said a deluge of freshwater into Galveston Bay as a result of heavy rainfall from Harvey triggered “significant mortality” on some oyster beds.

So-called finfish — such as flounder, black drum and sheepshead — are mobile and were able to move away from danger, Robinson said, which is why commercial harvests of those species rebounded relatively quickly once it had past.

“There may have been some disruption (in finfish availability at restaurants and grocery stores) closer to the window of when the storm occurred, but I would think things have gotten back to normal,” he said.

Oysters are stationary, however, and the high mortality on some beds crimped what had been expected to be a relatively solid Texas oyster harvest this season for an industry that has struggled with alternating droughts and floods since Hurricane Ike did major damage to it in 2008.

Robinson said the destruction to Texas oyster beds from Hurricane Harvey actually wasn’t as widespread as initially feared — every bay system, for instance, had some areas open for commercial harvest on Nov. 1 as scheduled — but he said oyster supplies were tight in the aftermath.

“Demand (from consumers) continues to be high, and the availability of oysters is in shorter supply,” he said, noting that harvests in Louisiana and some other oyster-producing states have been stressed as well for various reasons.

Tracy Woody, president of Jeri’s Seafood Inc., an oyster producer at Galveston Bay that supplies wholesalers in Austin and other cities, said Hurricane Harvey cost his company more than 90 percent of the oyster crop that it grows on bay bottom leased from the state.

“The tremendous local rain (from Harvey) just killed those oysters” because of the influx of freshwater, Woody said.

He said he’s buying “quite a bit of oysters from Louisiana” and from independent fishermen, describing the price as the highest he has seen it in several decades in the industry.

The elevated wholesale prices likely are being passed onto oyster lovers at many restaurants and seafood counters in Austin and elsewhere in Texas, he and others said, although they noted the retail impact should be muted because of the relatively small quantities of oysters — only a dozen or so at a time, for instance — that consumers generally order.

“People are probably only paying about $1 to $2 more per plate at the restaurant,” said Curtis, of Austin Seafood Products.

Huntsberger, of Quality Seafood, said she has so far spared her customers even a small price increase, however. A plate of a dozen raw oysters on the half shell at her restaurant costs $15.99, she said, unchanged from a year ago.

“You’re always going to see fluctuations in seafood” based on seasonal factors and supply and demand, she said. “We try to price ours so that it stays really consistent.”

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