Living Shorelines: Recruiting Oysters for Habitat Restoration and Climate Adaptation

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Boyer Research Group staff and volunteers trudge through the mud near San Rafael to check on offshore oyster reefs. Photo by Sally Rae Kimmel/Bay Nature

By Sean Greene, Bay Nature

When the first live eastern oysters came to the Bay Area by train in the late 1800s, Victorian-era foodies lined up to buy them by the box at four dollars for 200. Capitalizing on San Franciscans and their love of trendy food, would-be oyster farmers followed, hoping to raise their imported shellfish in the Bay.

But life proved difficult for the farmers and their oysters. For the preferred eastern oyster (Crassostrea virginica), summers in the Bay Area were too hot and dry, stingrays too hungry, and one particular “parasite” far too fast-growing for the bivalve to take hold, as the naturalist Charles Townsend wrote in 1893. “It is possible that I have not attached sufficient importance to the evil of overcrowding,” Townsend declared, by this “remarkably fertile” competitor.

The so-called parasite was the once-abundant Olympia oyster (Ostrea lurida), the West Coast’s and the bay’s only species of native oyster. But in the years since Townsend wrote about them, the public’s attitude has changed. Dismissed as “worthless” a century ago, native oysters are now one of the key parts of an ambitious idea to restore the Bay’s health and simultaneously protect people and land from the danger of sea level rise.

Read the complete story at Bay Nature. 

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