New England reefs: Their world is the oyster

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WESTPORT — Horseradish, cocktail sauce, or straight up? However you take your oyster, their near extinction may be difficult to swallow. 

A little over 100 years ago, U.S. fishermen landed roughly 1.5 billion pounds of the craggy bivalve per year, compared to just 29.7 million pounds in 2022.

Oysters’ disappearance means more than just an increase in the price of your happy hour. Without them, water quality dips, sea grass beds recede, and salt marshes erode.

For these reasons and more, The Nature Conservancy is hoping to bring back critical oyster reefs in Massachusetts, beginning with restoration projects in Westport, Fairhaven, Mashpee, and Bourne. If successful, the wild oyster colonies will improve water quality in New England’s estuaries and help form the foundation for more erosion- and flood-resistant “living shorelines.”

But first, residents will have to resist eating them.

In 2025, The Nature Conservancy partnered with the Massachusetts Division of Marine Fisheries (DMF), the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Natural Resources Conservation Service and the Cape Cod Conservation District to develop a program to restore the region’s coastal habitat, including its historic oyster reefs.

The Nature Conservancy identified several communities on the Cape and the South Coast best primed for oyster restoration with the goal of rebuilding 10% to 20% of the shellfish’s original habitat. 

Now, Nature Conservancy Coastal Project Manager Dan Goulart travels town to town hoping to convince residents that oysters are worth keeping around — and not just on the half-shell. In January, Goulart led a talk for members of the Westport River Watershed Alliance, ahead of his presentation to the Westport Select Board this spring.

In his talk, Goulart connected the healthy oyster population to historic pastimes like bay scallop fishing, which depend on a healthy eel grass system supported by oysters.

“To me, engaging in this restoration, bringing these oysters back … that is like preserving our historic heritage and who we are as New Englanders,” Goulart said.

Tragedy of the commons

Just 100 years ago, wild oyster reefs dotted just about every part of the Eastern coastline. Westport alone hosted 360 acres of oyster reefs along its river and estuaries. These filter-feeding shellfish were critical to maintaining healthy nitrogen and nutrient levels in both fresh and salt waterways. They served as the bedrock for a healthy marine ecosystem much in the way that coral supports tropical reefs.

Decades later, wild oysters are “functionally extinct,” Goulart said, and New England’s rivers, ponds, and coastlines feel their absence. Areas once teeming with marine life now lie nearly barren, once-productive ocean floors are now stacked with silt and sediment.

Overharvesting and diseases like the dreaded oyster dermo and MSX contributed to the fallout, which was compounded by the fact that once riverbeds and marshes fill up with sediment, it’s harder for oysters to resettle in those areas.

“It really is just a tragedy of the commons,” Goulart said.

Using state GIS data of current and historic shellfish grounds, Goulart and his team identified several ideal regions for new, experimental wild oyster reefs: Westport, Bourne, Mashpee, and Falmouth. These oyster grounds must be far enough away that they won’t interfere with recreation or existing aquaculture, but not so remote that The Nature Conservancy can’t access or monitor them.

The Nature Conservancy is proposing to restore 60 acres of wild oyster reef in Westport — just one-sixth of its historic shellfish habitat. Restoring these reefs is about building up from the bottom.

To give oysters a hard surface to latch onto and eventually form their reefs, The Nature Conservancy will have to line the bottom of the intended riverbed or estuary with a substrate called “cultch,” made up of old, discarded surfclam and oyster shells. Then, the organization lays down a layer of “spat-on-shell,” or larval oysters who have already settled on shells and begun to grow.

Much of the material for these new reefs comes from existing oyster aquaculture, Goulart explained. In the past decade or so, oyster farming has taken off in New England waters, although the practice has hit several roadblocks in Buzzards Bay due to the high frequency of combined sewer overflows from New Bedford.

Although oyster farmers sell their shellfish rather than leave them to purify the ocean indefinitely, the aquaculture industry is a critical partner in wild oyster reef restoration, Goulart said. When an oyster farmer can’t sell a particular crop due to looks or size, the Nature Conservancy can buy those oysters to fill out their reefs.

“They call them their ‘wonkies,’” Goulart said. “They’re curved or ugly or they grow too big and restaurants don’t want them — those are the ones we love.”

The Chesapeake Bay miracle

Nearly 25 years ago, the Chesapeake Bay was in a similar position that New England now finds itself in. Small-scale efforts to restore the region’s wild oyster population had failed, and some debated whether to introduce a foreign oyster species to kick-start growth.

Instead, the Army Corps of Engineers attempted a large-scale, 80-acre restoration within the mouth of the Great Wicomico River, just south of the Potomac. Rom Lipcius, a professor of the William & Mary Virginia Institute of Marine Science, had been tasked to monitor the results.

“There were over 100 million oysters out there,” Lipcius said of his findings.

The project’s success spurred a regional oyster renaissance. Today, the Chesapeake Bay is home to over 1,700 acres of wild oyster reef and serves as the model for The Nature Conservancy’s projects for Massachusetts.

Lipcius recalled the upstream battle he and his colleagues initially faced to prove that oyster restoration could work — an argument his younger colleagues today can’t believe anyone ever disputed.

“The whole mindset has changed dramatically,” Lipcius said. “We were fighting what I would consider the ‘good ol’ boy’ network on restoration, [to prove] that it could work. And now everybody all the way from Virginia to Maryland believes that restoration works.”

What separated the restoration work on Great Wicomico from past disappointments was the size and height of the reef, Lipcius explained. Building the reef over a foot off the seafloor prevented sediment from building up and covering the substrate.

The reef’s large size also ensured that the oysters could self-populate. Oyster larvae spill out freely into the ocean, fertilizing in the water before settling onto shell. These larvae can travel miles depending on currents, meaning even the healthiest, most productive reef could fall barren if the larvae washes up elsewhere, Lipcius said.

To prevent a die-off with smaller projects, restorers should aim to create a “meta-population” of oysters, connecting reefs across the region so that their larvae can populate one another. Lipcius said everyday property owners can help with this endeavor by setting out “oyster gardening” cages in the water to grow their own oysters (and even eat them, too).

If approved, the reefs built in Westport, Mashpee, Fairhaven and Bourne could make up a meta-population. But unlike in Virginia, Massachusetts’ emphasis on local rule means Goulart must work with each town individually and make his case, and any one town’s decision to say no could spell doom for the overall reef system.

Goulart, for his part, welcomes the chance to educate residents on the value of wild oysters and build community buy-in. After all, he added, the responsibility to our natural world — and to the small but mighty oyster — is a shared one.

“We don’t want to be the guys that let the barn fall down,” Goulart said.

Email Brooke Kushwaha at bkushwaha@newbedfordlight.org.

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