On a beautiful June day, Caroline Larsson is navigating down the Little River, in Mashpee, toward Hamblin Pond. She’s a Senior Shellfish Technician for the Town of Mashpee, and she’s piloting ten-thousand live oysters to a man-made reef.
"Right now we're dumping some of our oysters from last season onto the culch that we placed in November, hoping that they'll start to reef, start to spawn, and we can get a natural set here, which would be really great," she explained.
Onboard to spread the oysters are Mashpee Shellfish Constable Chris Avis, Natural Resources Officer Tyler Grady, and Dan Goulart, coastal project manager for The Nature Conservancy in Massachusetts, who says the state’s coastal communities are vulnerable.
"Millions of people are in jeopardy of either having a loss of infrastructure or a loss of personal property," Goulart said. "So investing in nature-based approaches to coastal resilience and biodiversity is really a big bet for the Massachusetts [TNC] chapter right now."
Instead of building gray infrastructure like seawalls, Goulart said restoring natural habitats like oyster reefs – as well as salt marshes and seagrass beds – can provide similar protection, while also improving water quality and promoting fish habitat.
"They anchor sediment and help dampen wave energy, which reduces erosion, which we're all concerned about," Goulart said. "They create fish habitat for a lot of fish we like to eat, and all the smaller creatures that the fish eat. And they also filter and clean our water."
A single oyster can filter 30 to 50 gallons of water per day. Multiply that by the hundreds of thousands of oysters on even a small reef, and you start to see a real difference.
Goulart said Hambiln Pond is just the beginning. The Nature Conservancy is partnering with the Massachusetts Division of Marine Fisheries and local municipalities on large, system-scale projects in the East Branch of the Westport River, the Bass River in Dennis and Yarmouth, on Martha's Vineyard in Edgartown and Tisbury Great Ponds, in Plumb Island Sound on the North Shore, as well as upper Buzzards Bay in Wareham and Bourne, which Goulart said was historically one of the state’s biggest oyster growing regions, but now has almost no wild oysters.
"Oysters used to be prolific, wide spread in every estuary in Massachusetts," he said. "You know, tens of thousands of acres throughout the state. But over 150 years, they were almost entirely depleted. And today they're functionally extinct in Massachusetts waters."
The Town of Mashpee donated about 100,000 oysters to populate this reef on Hamblin Pond. The Nature Conservancy has been working with municipalities to site the projects and obtain state and local permits. State permitting has been a struggle, but Goulart said it’s getting better.
"In order for us, and other organizations who are doing ecological restoration to scale, we need the state and the permitting agencies to really recognize not only the importance of these habitats, but the sense of urgency we're in right now, as climate change seems to be advancing more rapidly," he said.
Goulart said he’s encouraged by the Department of Marine Fisheries’ involvement in the project. DMF Seasonal Research Assistant Summer O’Rourke was on hand in Mashpee to help distribute farmed oysters onto the reef, and she explained the process:.
"By introducing these populations, and like you can grow them in a lab or whatever, once they get large enough then you bring them into the wild later on, but you just kind of sprinkle them into the water and you can help sustain the wild populations."
Like coral reefs, oyster reefs create habitat for other species, including fish, invertebrates and other shellfish. Goulart said, if we don’t have healthy estuaries, we can’t have thriving fisheries.
"Life creates the conditions that are conducive to life," he said. "So if there's no life in the estuary and there's no oyster larvae left and there's no other species left, you can’t expect it just to generate life on its own. And oysters can be a great beginning to that."
This fall, the crew will be back to add another layer onto the reef – oyster shells covered in larvae from the hatchery, known as spat on shell. Goulart said adding multiple generations will help build a sustainable reef.
