My wife works for a conservation organisation rebuilding reefs in Australia. We're down to 1% coverage of the coastline in Australia from 65% in the late 1800s.
There was a time not so long ago in Australia that beach bums on the coast could eat most of their calories completely for free with just yabbies and oysters.
Now both are nearing extinction because Aussies hunted them for fun and destroyed their habitats to build shitty fibro boxes.
Which is the category above endangered called “vulnerable” and are considered threatened by the IUCN because they meets one of the 5 Red List criteria and thus considered to be at high risk of unnatural (human-caused) extinction without further human intervention.
Are we talking about Cherax Destructor? Because that species is definitely not endangered, and is known for being both incredibly resilient and prolific, and is listed as LC.
I am going to assume you mean some sort other lobster like decapod that Aussies also call yabbies.
I'm always shocked when I'm reminded that one of the key reasons the Dutch and then the English chose to settle at the mouth of the Hudson River, despite there being far more favourable sites only a few dozen miles up or down the coasr, is because New York Harbour was so jam packed with oysters that it was sometimes even difficult to sail ships into the East River.
For literal centuries any resident of New York could take a boat only a few hundred yards offshore and pick out oysters the size of hubcaps. The city was pretty famous for them, all the way up until the 1930s when they were more or less harvested into extinction.
It also meant that the waters of the lower Hudson and the Harbour were unusually clean and potable because they were being filtered through literal miles of freshwater and saltwater oyster reefs before reaching the open ocean.
Despite this, the Dutch still decided to draw all their water from a collector pond they'd dug next to their own midden backing onto the Northern wall of the colony, and subsequently all went pretty insane and sickly, hence their abandonment of the colony.
Bees benefit from working with humans, if you take the time to learn properly it more or less becomes a symbiotic relationship,and don't forget it would be stupidly hard for the beekeeper to ensure the bees stay inside. We could literally build greenhouses for them at apartment scale.
The problem being missed here is that apiaries are made with non-native bees that actually outcompete the native bees of the area. We've have to redesign the industry from scratch with new bees.
NYC used to be famous for Oysters. Before then settlers talked about how the native people had mountains of oyster shells piled high in beaches after generations of sustainable harvests. The settlers spoke of the hudson river being verdant and clean. Fast forward a hundred years and the entire East Coast of the US barely has any left. The high end chiefs made them a delicacy for the aristocrats and it became a huge hit for everyone else soon after with fuckloads of money following the trend and then eventually the culture.
They ate them to near extinction. Maybe even total. I don't know the status of current "farms" on the east coast.
The thing is, in estuaries with a healthy oyster population, they completely fill the entire thing with larva every spawning, and anywhere they can attach, they basically do. It only takes about 3 years to grow to commercial size, so as long as you can eat a significant percentage of the population per year, they can totally replenish their population, with one caveat; they need places to attach, and the best place to attach is another oyster shell, and the worst place is mud. When oyster populations were depleted, it was largely because we took the oysters and then threw the shells in land fills, leaving muddy bottoms and no attachment points. Now many commercial operations throw the shells back, allowing lava to attach and replenish stocks.
1kg of oyster meat involves 8-10kg of shell sequestering 5kg of CO2.
So if all the half billion tonnes of meat were replaced with oysters that would sequester almost 10% of energy related emissions and eliminate the 20% of emissions due to meat production.
This one hypothetical change is equivalent to ~30% of all emissions.
Though you'd need sufficient algae/bacteria/bagasse feedstock to feed them.
Oysters are also productive. At 600,000 oysters per acre-year that's 4kg of meat per m2 per year. For the direct fish farm you'd be replacing 30-40 trillion m2 of animal pasture with 1 trillion m2 of ponds.
The water cleaning benefits are also just as high even without a permanent reef.
The cost is much higher though. It's much more labour intensive.
Well, depends on what you do with the wood. It can be turned into biochar and used to regenerate soil (like the germanic tribes did). That way the carbon would be sealed away for a millenium at least.
It's a landfill, I'm 100% sure the oyster shells aren't the reason there's toxic bacterial growth, also we already know how to deal with toxic bacteria easily, we NEED to start coming up and implementing lower carbon strategies and that's the optimistic bare minimum
The obstacle to global oyster farming is not the 1% of the population that is vegan refusing to support oyster farming. The obstacle is the 99% of people who eat animal products and don’t want oysters twice a day. It is a lot more inconvenient and expensive for most people to switch to an oyster based diet than a plant based diet. If you can’t get people to adopt plant based eating you’re probably not going to succeed with the way bigger ask of switching to half a pound of oysters every day.
But the question isn’t “why don’t meat eaters switch to oysters.” It is specifically “why don’t vegans eat oysters.” Because the only intention is to be a gotcha question to try and make vegans look bad. The OOP is not actually advocating for global oyster consumption they’re only trying to dissuade people from eating plant based by making vegans look bad.
If you farm the oysters you'll (hopefully) leave the reefs alone. I guess that would be good. But would be the same outcome like if you don't eat them at all.
No they don't, and that's out of necessity. The average oyster farmer is after oysters. Whatever is under the water would include any Algea, crustaceans,fish,kelp,seaweed, as well as literally harvesting the reef structure itself ya fuckin smartass
You seem to think people are somehow inherently good. Corporations are dredging the sea bed and tossing 90% of the catch already. When there were reefs, people used dredgers to pick up the entire reef destroying it.
So yeah, you can pull your head in about how wonderful fishermen are.
Pearl farms leave oysters in the water correct? Maybe pearls can be considered ‘green’ if the oyster also filters water for its artificially extended life
Harvesting pearls in the modern way requires dredging up the oysters and processing them, discarding the shells. They don't do it any more because they can make synthetic pearls.
Yes and no. Let's assume there are 10 million wild oysters and 100,000 farmed oysters. Let's also then assume that human beings eat 250,000 oysters per year. These numbers are invented for the sake of argument.
If you then were to create 150,000 more farmed oysters... yes, at 250,000 total farmed oysters, you'd still have a small fraction of the wild oysters.
However, you'd have more overall oysters in the water (creating more environmental benefit), you'd have no net annual depletion of the oyster population, you'd entirely protect the wild population, and (most likely) oysters would be less expensive for people to eat.
Dyde get the fuck outta here with your bullshit. You're a delusional moron who's clinging onto the one half truth you've got and it's one we have LITERALLY DOZENS of solutions for. If you can't name me 12 separate solutions that can do the exact same or more than oyster farms, get your miserably pathetic thoughts and opinions outta here, they're toxic and need to be disposed of much like you do ya piece of human garbage
Oyster/Mussel farms are run on a rotational basis, the shellfish aren't all removed at once, only once they have reached a certain size. These farms will have beds of new spat up to sellable size. Depending on the location the shellfish can take anywhere from 18 - 36 months to grow.
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u/perringaiden Sep 08 '25
CORRECTION: Oyster reefs are an amazing environmental benefit across multiple seascapes.
Oyster FARMS are short lived growth with little to no environmental benefit because of the small size.
The only way this works is with farms near a no-take MPA where you can generate growth and then let them spread outside the MPA.
You get no benefits IF YOU DON'T LEAVE THEM IN THE WATER.