New Hope for Olympia Oysters

The only oyster species native to Elkhorn Slough and the entire West Coast of North America, the Olympia oyster filters the estuary’s waters and provides habitat and food for many other species. Yet largely due to human activity in the past 150 years, native oyster populations have been in steep decline. Elkhorn Slough Reserve is committed to restoring Olympia oysters and their habitat.

In a recently published paper in the journal Biological Conservation, the Reserve research team shares promising results from a collaboration with Moss Landing Marine Laboratories to restore Olympia oysters in Elkhorn Slough with the aid of aquaculture —the first effort of its kind in California.

“This was a small-scale proof-of-concept project but it doubled our population of Olympia oysters,” says Reserve Research Coordinator Kerstin Wasson. “We provided a new generation of young oysters and now hope we can scale up dramatically to restore the estuary’s population to a sustainable size.”