Communities sustainably harvested oyster reefs for thousands of years. Then colonization came along.
From the coast of Maine to Florida, piles of oysters have stacked up over thousands of years. They come from meals gathered from once-vast reefs of living shellfish, which provided habitat for other fish, crabs, and shrimp in estuaries. Some of the shells are so big, you’d have to eat them with a knife and fork, instead of downing them in a single slurp.
The new survey builds on decades-old work that reshaped marine conservation. In 2004, Michael Kirby, a paleoecologist at the University of California at San Diego,oyster harvesting in eastern Australia, the Eastern Seaboard of the US, and the Pacific coast of North America. Using historical data on annual oyster hauls, he showed that over a period of a century, growing industrial centers in both the US and Australia chewed through nearby reefs rapidly.
“I think it’s the first time anybody’s been able to pull that together [global perspective]. They did such a beautiful job of it,” says Erle Ellis, an environmental scientist and conservation ethicist at the University of Maryland who was not involved in the research. “Here is a pattern around the world where you can have sustainable oyster fisheries, managed for long periods of time. Recent times are where the problems show up.
Instead, when Hunt sees a shell mound, he thinks of the communal labor it would have taken to pile baskets of shells high into the air. “You have to have people feeding those carrying the baskets You have to have people mending the baskets. It’s a complete organization of labor that made those communities into distinct groups that are still known today,” he says.