![]() Over the course of eight months in 2016, the lab raised oyster castles along Gandy’s Beach and Money Island on the Jersey Shore. When you’re trying to reduce wave energy, you need certain heights.” “You can stack them on different shapes and different heights. “The main draw for oyster castles is that you can get height with them, you can build them in any configuration you want, kind of like Legos,” says Jenny Shinn, a program coordinator at the Haskin lab. Unlike simply pouring spat into water, these castles give oyster reefs a scaffolding to grow on, which can come in handy when there aren’t enough shells to start a reef. The blocks are made from a blend of concrete and oyster shells. Oyster castles are a matrix of interlocking blocks stacked onto each other. In the Delaware Bay in New Jersey, researchers at Rutgers University’s Haskin Shellfish Research Laboratory are adding one more step to the restoration process: They’re constructing oyster castles. The Chesapeake Bay Foundation redistributes spat to oyster gardeners and pours them into waterways where oyster reefs used to be. Without shells on which to plant, larvae usually sink to the bottom of their marine environments and die. Becoming spat is a crucial step in oyster development. The shells then get dumped into big fish tanks populated by oyster larvae-or “spat”-which attach to the shells and begin to grow as they would in their natural environment. “That quarantine period where they sit out in the sun is just to protect the Bay transfer of disease or parasites or predators that may have come from a different system,” Pollack says. Run by the Chesapeake Bay Foundation, a nonprofit that supports restoration efforts in the area, these shells are washed clean of debris and then bathed in sunlight for six months to kill potential pathogens. In Maryland, restaurants can donate their leftover oyster shells in drop-off bins located throughout the state. And that’s where oyster shell recycling comes in. This means that when oysters are removed from the water in service of dollar-oyster happy hours, gone too are their calcium carbonate shells, which would have become the substrates that house future generations of oysters. But for oysters, the way that reefs are built is essentially: The younger generations of oysters cement and attach themselves onto the shelves of the older generations of oysters that form the foundation of the reef.” ![]() “If you’re going to go fishing, you go and catch a fish, but you don’t remove the water with it. Jennifer Pollack, chair of the Harte Research Institute for Gulf of Mexico Studies at Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi. “When you harvest an oyster, essentially you harvest its habitat right alongside it,” says Dr. Unlike most other sea creatures, oysters don’t just live in the water-they specifically need to live on other oysters. ![]() But we’re not likely to have an abundance of natural Britas going forward: Beyond the ongoing threat facing oysters from climate change and increasingly powerful storms, 80 percent of oyster habitats, known as oyster reefs, have been destroyed by overharvesting and pollution in the past century. And some, like the New York-based Billion Oyster Project, are run by high-school students.Īs you may know, oysters are filter feeders, which means that they filter water-thereby removing pollutants like nitrogen and phosphorus-while they search for sustenance. Others are specific to certain bodies of water, like the Galveston Bay Foundation’s Oyster Shell Recycling Program in Texas. Some are state-run, like the South Carolina Oyster Restoration and Enhancement Program (SCORE). In the past few years, a surge of oyster shell recycling programs have emerged in coastal regions. Instead, it may be redeposited back into the waters from which it came, to serve as a home-or even a castle-for future oysters to come. If you eat an oyster today, its shell may not necessarily end up in landfill, as it would have in the past. This fall, there’s another reason to revel in the oyster harvest, beyond its sheer gustatory pleasure. But if you’ve been heeding it, then you’re likely just beginning to rejoice in the dawn of oyster season. If you’re like me, you’ve largely disregarded this rule in favor of your own self-interest. You may have heard this centuries-old maxim about when it’s safe to eat raw oysters: Don’t indulge in the bivalves during any month spelled without the letter “R.” (Though, there’s plenty of cause to consider the maxim suspect.) Update, 3:35 p.m., EST: This piece has been updated to include additional information about third-party certification.
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