All About Trash in Rhode Island
How we can reduce, reuse, recycle and rot our way to a cleaner, more sustainable Ocean State.
Oysters Gone Wild!
A Nature Conservancy program repurposes oyster shells for reef and marsh restoration. By Casey Nilsson
Wolf Matthewson
In early 2020, the Nature Conservancy’s Oysters Gone Wild restoration program was cracking wide open. At the time, volunteers for the nonprofit were collecting discarded oyster shells by the bucketful from four local restaurants: Matunuck Oyster Bar, Midtown Oyster Bar, The Mooring and 22 Bowen’s. Volunteers would bring the shells to a centralized location in South County, where they’d cure for about a year before they were repurposed in habitat restoration projects.
“We were just making headway,” says Tim Mooney of the Nature Conservancy (TNC), “and talking about how to get from four to ten and all the restaurants were shut down.”
They’d been doing the work, on and off, for about a decade. In 2017, and with funding from the federal Sport Fish Restoration Program, TNC partnered with the Department of Environmental Management to use the shells to build nine small reefs out of mesh bags filled with oyster shells — “bigger than a car, but not huge,” Mooney says — in Quonochontaug Pond in Charlestown. They wanted to know how quickly life would appear: algae, juvenile sport fish like tautaug, and native oysters.
“Almost immediately, sea life or marine life began to colonize the reefs,” he says. “The practice is brand new so we really don’t have anything to compare it to. But we are learning as we go.”
One thing they learned: If they wanted a world of oysters, they’d have to seed it themselves. The coastal ponds — which, at one time, would only flush with seawater during big storms — are permanently breached. The salinity of the ponds has changed and, Mooney estimates, is now outside the reproduction range of native oysters.
So TNC is setting its sights on the upper reaches of the Narrow River, where salinity is lower and native oyster populations are small but self-sustained. Mooney is hopeful the experiment — which requires controversial aquaculture permitting, despite not being an aquaculture operation — will demonstrate recruitment of natural oysters. More is better: An adult oyster, he says, can filter up to fifty gallons of water a day. Upper Narragansett Bay, where water quality is impaired but improving, is another area that would benefit from reef restoration and oyster recruitment.
“The upper bay and other estuaries are undoubtedly affected by removing those reefs from the natural system,” he says, pointing to overfishing, water pollution, shellfish disease and loss of habitat due to the filling in of Providence’s Great Salt Cove and the armoring of the Providence River. Those factors, combined with the permanent breaching of the coastal ponds, have led to the loss of 95 percent of Rhode Island’s wild oyster population.
But, Mooney adds, “In order to do any of these experiments, we need the raw shell. Once we get past the pandemic, talk to your favorite raw bar about recycling oyster shells. There’s much more shell going into landfill than into the water and we need to turn that around.” nature.org
