Bay Oysters

Walking out onto the mudflats in Richmond or Oakland might just swallow your feet whole, pulling you into the world of barnacles, salt, and seaweed. That's where one of the foods historically tied to San Francisco Bay and the Gold Rush can also be found: The Olympia Oyster. While the prospectors once enjoyed these little oysters after finding some shiny rocks. Most of what is served in restaurants across the Bay Area is now imported from Washington. 

In comes the Wild Oyster Project. It was inspired by an East Coast initiative in which a group of scientists dumped 3 million pounds of oyster shells into coastal waters and saw the native oyster population increase in a few years.

As part of the project, thousands upon thousands of shucked and slurped oyster shells are collected, regardless of species, picked clean by chickens, dried in the sun, and then either dumped into the water or crushed to build artificial reefs that oyster larvae attach to. To see if their efforts are having an impact, a group of scientists, mostly volunteers from UC Berkeley, ventures out once a month to low-lying mudflats to count the different species present. 

The project hopes to see similar results that will allow the filter-feeding creatures to return to the bay, cleaning the water and restoring a sustainable, local food source, along with a harvesting economy.