By 2015, Georgia had added about 200 retired chicken-transport cages to an offshore reef; the steel structures became fish habitat

A few miles offshore Georgia, past the murky green water barrier, is a section of sea bottom constructed from discarded steel crib frames used to transport live chickens to slaughterhouses. It's literal poultry gear, encrusted with barnacles and covered in black sea bass. This is among one of the more under-the-radar conservation hacks the U.S. has up its sleeve.

By 2015, about 200 cast-off chicken-transport cages had joined another group of cages sunk earlier by Georgia's Department of Natural Resources in a reef six miles off Tybee Island. A 2015 Times-Enterprise report, “Cast-off chicken cages see second life as artificial reefs,” says that Fieldale and Claxton, the two poultry processors, donated the retired cages and the Coastal Conservation Association of Georgia raised about $18,500 only to transport them offshore.

Why were chicken cages sunk?


Georgia's shore is very level and sandy, perfect for shrimping, but not so inviting for fish that need structure to hide, feed and breed. Since 1970, the state's Offshore Artificial Reef Project has been dumping any heavy, stable and benign object it can locate, such as old Navy tanks, subway cars from New York City, bridge debris, tug boats and, indeed, poultry cages. Georgia DNR’s historical reports suggest the metal chicken transport cages have been used for decades, alongside other reef-building materials such as concrete pipe, boat molds and steel vessels, to add hard surfaces to featureless bottoms.

The bigger picture.

Georgia's chicken cages represent just a single component of a much greater national artificial-reef effort. The 2024 peer-reviewed study titled “Artificial reef footprint in the United States ocean,” in Nature Sustainability, led by NOAA scientist Avery B. Paxton, examined data from 17 U.S. coastal states with ocean reefing programmes, rather than referring to the total number of U.S. coastal states.

Researchers aggregated the information from each coastal state's reef program since the 1890s to calculate for the first time the full physical impact of America's manmade reefs: They cover 19.23 square kilometers (about 3,600 football fields) of intentionally sunk reef structures. The study estimated that these structures occupied 19.23 square kilometers of seafloor through 2020, with the intentional reef footprint increasing 20.85-fold between 1970 and 2020.

The catch

There's a lot of doubt that needs to be poured into this before it becomes a feel-good green ocean tale. Reefing programs are implemented state-by-state, with widely varying levels of regulation and oversight, and the study in Nature Sustainability states that the ecological value and potential risks, such as contaminants leaching from old materials or disturbance of existing seafloor habitat, remain poorly quantified nationally. Fish might hang out in a chicken cage, but that doesn't make it sustainable. It is still industrial garbage tossed into the ocean; it just happens to work as habitat.

Why should this matter

Strange, but true, is the counterexample to the many that have griped about how little the US does for climate and ocean policy: dirty, underfunded, volunteer-driven, and more successful than most realize. It is not a solution to loss of ocean biodiversity. However, it serves as a good reminder that conservation is not always pretty. In this case, a barge carrying numerous chicken cages was pushed off the side of a boat near Tybee Island as part of an artificial-reef deployment.