Visit Cedar Key

Get this on your calendar…

Come join us. Great things to come.

Check out our friend’s places!

Check out our August & September availability for the extended Grouper season!

Book at www.CedarKeyCottages.com

Professionally Managed by Pelican Vacation Home!

Thanks Living Cedar Key! Big Deck Bar & Grill Cedar Key FL Food Truck!!

Follow these folks, give them a little love and encouragement!

Congratulations to Cedar Key Fire Rescue! What. Fabulous gift!

Cedar Key Fire Rescue receives handcrafted fire hose flag CEDAR KEY — Cedar Key Fire Rescue recently received a handcrafted American flag made from discarded fire hose, a gift from Denny George.

What do you know about Cedar Key's Aquaculture?

Cedar Key's hard clam aquaculture industry is one of the most successful and most specifically place-dependent agricultural enterprises in Florida, and the story of how it came to be — how a small Gulf Coast fishing community that had lost its economic foundation multiple times over the course of its history developed a new one from the specific ecological conditions of the shallow flats surrounding the island — is one of the more quietly remarkable economic adaptation stories in the state's recent history. 🦪🌿 The industry began in the early 1990s as an experimental program run through the University of Florida's Sea Grant program, which identified the shallow, productive tidal flats of the Cedar Key area as potentially suitable for hard clam culture and provided the initial technical training and seed clams that allowed the first growers to establish operations. The early participants were largely former commercial fishermen and their families — people with existing knowledge of the water and the tides and the specific behavior of the Gulf flats, who brought that knowledge to a new form of marine agriculture that required the same attentiveness and the same physical endurance as the fishing it was supplementing or replacing. The transition from fishing to clam farming was not frictionless — the economics were different, the time horizons were longer, the regulatory framework was more complex — but the community that navigated those differences produced an industry that now generates more than 80 percent of Florida's farmed clam harvest and has made Cedar Key one of the most significant hard clam producing areas in the eastern United States.

The ecological conditions that make the Cedar Key flats so productive for clam culture are the same conditions that have made the area biologically significant for the entire duration of Florida's human history — the shallow, well-flushed water of the Nature Coast, the seagrass beds that provide both food and habitat for the clams and the predators that would consume them, and the relative absence of the water quality degradation that has affected Florida's more developed coastal areas. The clams that grow in Cedar Key's leased flats filter the surrounding water as they feed, each adult clam capable of filtering up to a gallon of water per hour and removing the phytoplankton and suspended particles that constitute its diet — a biological service that has measurable water quality benefits for the entire estuary and that makes the clam aquaculture operation simultaneously an agricultural enterprise and an ecological asset. The growers who manage these leases understand this relationship with a specificity that comes from years of daily observation of the same flats under the same range of conditions, and their knowledge of what affects clam growth and survival in this specific environment is the kind of practical ecological understanding that no textbook has captured.

The Cedar Key Seafood Festival, held each October as the clam harvest season peaks, draws visitors from throughout the region to a working waterfront town that has maintained its character precisely because the clam industry gave it an economic reason to remain what it was rather than transform into something more conventional. 🌊 Have you tasted a Cedar Key clam — raw on the half shell, in a chowder, steamed open at the dock — and did you know that the specific flavor of those clams is as inseparable from the specific ecology of the Nature Coast as an Apalachicola oyster was from Apalachicola Bay?