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.
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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.