Five Oyster Habitats along East Coast
Oysters were everywhere along the east coast at one time, but virtually have disappeared from 85% of their historic range. Five separate habitats show great potential for restoration and to help repopulate the eastern seaboard of the United States.
There are currently active restoration projects in Long Bay, Chesapeake Bay and New York City Harbor. At a recent event at the Academy of Science in NYC, Paul Greenberg, author of Four Fish: The Future of the Last Wild Food, explained that there were once trillions of oysters in the New York City Harbor.
The image above are the five habitats compared at the same scale. You can see that the NYC Harbor is one of the smallest areas of the five. WIth the potential of trillions oysters off the tip of Manhattan, imagine the number possible for Chesapeake Bay.
The reestablishment of large oyster populations in these areas could kickstart the restoration of the invertebrates throughout the eastern waters of North America. Oyster populations can't regrow naturally without the presence of a metapopulation - which is absent via the local extinction of oysters in 85% of the historically range. The creation of large-scale restoration projects in these five critical areas would essentially be the beginning of a new metapopulation. A new metapopulation could fuel the genetic and spat (juvenile oysters) numbers needed to make other smaller projects along the coast more easily possible.