Photo courtesy of Shante Richardson.
Demi Johnson, checking her oyster "garden" in Biloxi, Mississippi.
Demi Johnson wasn’t even born when Hurricane Katrina demolished the Mississippi Gulf Coast. Nor was she here five years later, when the DeepWater Horizon Oil Spill poisoned thousands of miles of the Gulf’s underwater ecosystems. She was only ten when the U.S. Corps of Engineers opened the Bonnet Carré spillway in Louisiana, flooding freshwater into the Mississippi Sound and decimating oyster populations there.
She’s here now, though, and at only sixteen years old is leading the effort to restore native oyster populations in Mississippi.
Johnson’s oyster restoration project began when she was in seventh grade, looking for an idea to earn her Girl Scout Silver Award. The highest award a Cadette Girl Scout can achieve, it required Johnson to put at least fifty hours into addressing a community issue and working toward a long-term solution to bring positive change.
“I didn’t really have any ideas, but my Girl Scout leader suggested oyster gardening,” Johnson said. “I didn’t know anything about oysters, except my mom likes to eat them.”
Johnson learned that oysters are a vital contributor to the local marine ecosystem. “Oyster reefs can be home to over 300 marine species,” she said. “They also create a living shoreline to help prevent erosion, and each oyster can clean up to fifty gallons of water each day.” She learned about the impacts of recent decades’ disasters like Hurricane Katrina, which buried an enormous percentage of Mississippi’s oyster reefs, as well as the oil spill and opening of the Bonnet Carré—which each saw the population plummet even further.
Photo by Abram Eric Landes, courtesy of National Geographic.
Demi Johnson at the 2024 National Geographic Explorers Festival and Slingshot Challenge Awards Presentation with Chief Education Officer Dr. Deborah Grayson at the George Washington University.
“Around the world, eighty-five percent of oyster reefs have been lost,” Johnson said. This project was a way to assist in rebuilding that important population in her hometown of Biloxi, a city that is especially reliant on the oyster, from economic, cultural, and environmental standpoints.
Johnson's Girl Scout leader, Jean “Babs” Pfarrer, invited her and her troop to the pier behind her home on the Back Bay in Biloxi, Mississippi where they set up five wire cages, each containing a dozen or so juvenile oysters known as “spat.” The spat, which were provided by the organization, Oyster Gardening on the Northern Gulf Coast, were each about an eighth of an inch long and placed inside old oyster shells.
Johnson submerged her cages and tied them to Pfarrer’s pier. She visited them once a week between late August and March, pulling up each cage, inspecting each oyster, removing algae, micro pollutants, mud, and predators such as tiny shrimp, crabs, and fish that would happily eat the young oysters. She dutifully monitored and documented their growth.
“Mrs. Babs helped get me started,” Johnson said. “After that, my mom would drive me to her pier and I’d do it myself. Eventually we moved our cages to Schooner Pier in Biloxi, and now we have a second location at Captain’s Wharf Marina and Boat Launch in Gulfport.”
“I’m working on educating other people and trying to get them interested in oyster gardening. People have been very supportive, but they’re unfamiliar, even though they live right here by the water. The more people I can tell, and the more of us who are helping, the bigger difference we can make.” —Demi Johnson
Since beginning the project, Johnson has raised over 1,500 oysters to three or four inches long. Come spring, Oyster Gardening on the Northern Gulf Coast retrieved the young oysters and released them into deeper water in Bay St. Louis, where they will hopefully reach full maturity, spawn millions of new oysters, and form a reef to provide vital habitat to other marine life while also serving as a defense against coastal erosion. In all, through projects like Johnson’s, 93,000 oysters have been farmed at forty-eight sites along the Mississippi coast.
Pfarrer said Johnson put in far above the fifty hours required for her Silver Award. Now, she’s working to earn her Gold Award. To do so, she has pivoted her project toward community education. The Girl Scout Gold Award is the ultimate Girl Scouting honor, awarded to senior scouts grades nine through twelve who “identify a community issue, research it, create a sustainable ‘Take Action’ project that addresses a root cause, lead a team to implement the plan, and ensure the project has a national or global link and lasting impact.”
“I’m working on educating other people and trying to get them interested in oyster gardening,” Johnson said. “People have been very supportive, but they’re unfamiliar, even though they live right here by the water. The more people I can tell, and the more of us who are helping, the bigger difference we can make.”
Photo by Sarah Dunifon, courtesy of National Geographic.
2025 site visit of National Geographic Society education staff with Demi Johnson in Mississippi.
Johnson’s efforts have not gone unnoticed. In December 2023, she attended a three-day environmental filmmaking workshop presented through a partnership between the Walter Anderson Museum of Art and the National Geographic Society Slingshot Challenge. With the skills she learned there, Johnson was able to compete in the challenge—a global competition that encourages teens to share their innovations for solving environmental issues.
Her one-minute film, titled Off Bottom Oysters, described her project and placed her in the top fifteen out of over 2,100 student entries—earning her the distinction of the “Significant Achievement” award, with a $1,000 scholarship. She was one of only two U.S. students to receive recognition and was also a runner up for the competition’s People’s Choice Award. She received an invitation to the National Geographic Explorers Festival in Washington, D.C. and ultimately donated her winnings to the Mississippi Oyster Gardening Program, of which she is the youngest member.
More recently, she received the Youth Leadership in Marine Conservation Award from the National Marine Educators Association (NMEA), was featured in TIME for Kids, and appeared on an episode of CBS’s The Visioneers with Zay Harding. She was also named a national delegate representing Greater Mississippi at the Girl Scout National Convention in Washington, D.C. in July 2026.
"I just started this to earn my Silver Award but it’s gotten much bigger than that,” Johnson said.
All these awards have been exciting for Johnson, but the ninth grader couldn’t suppress a grin when she talked about one recent vote of confidence she received. “SZA reposted one of my posts on my Instagram page,” she beamed. “That gave me a lot more cred at school.”
The experience has granted Johnson a vision for her future. “I’ve always wanted to go to law school,” she said. “Now, I think I want to get a degree in Marine Biology and go on to law school to become an environmental attorney and help shape marine policy.”
You can follow Johnson and her conservation efforts on Instagram at @demijoystergarden.
