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Shell Recovery Partnership
Oysters have become a renaissance species. They play a vital role in habitat restoration with the growing understanding that oyster reefs clean the waters in which they live and create preferred habitats for commercial and recreational fish species. Oyster reefs help stabilize shorelines and mitigate some of the impacts of sea level rise while fighting the effects of ocean acidification.
A vital component of oyster restoration programs is shell. Shell is used as substrate for hatchery produced seed oysters and to create a hard bottom where the seed will thrive after being planted. As those mounds of wild oyster shell no longer sit outside of processing plants, oyster restoration efforts rely today on farmed oysters shells, raw bar shell that restaurants and oyster lovers casually throw away unaware of its value.
The Martha’s Vineyard Shell Recovery Partnership is a program of the Martha’s Vineyard Shellfish Group, Inc. and was created in 2011 under the initiative of a former hatchery staffer, Jessie Holtham. At the time, Mrs. Holtham was a manager of a busy restaurant serving high volumes of raw and cooked shellfish. She watched shells fill dumpsters at her place of work and knew how badly it was needed for shellfish habitat restoration. She formulated a shell pick-up program with these goals:
1. Reduce bulk waste from the Island’s waste stream
2. Increase buffering capacity of Martha’s Vineyard salt ponds
3. Provide a local source of shell for shellfish restoration
Since 2014, the project has been managed by Director Emma Green-Beach and passed down to a Restoration Coordinator in 2021. The Shell Recovery program picks up from 8-10 restaurants, from April through October. Specially marked totters sit in each restaurant’s waste storage area (back parking lot, alley way etc..) where wait staff can deposit shell after clearing tables. Three times a week, our Shell Recovery drivers load the truck with clean empty toters, drive to each location and swap a shell filled container for an empty one. The drivers then take the full toters to a secure outdoor location in Edgartown where the shell is dumped into a pile.
After aging for at least one year, recovered shell is used as the substrate of choice by hatchery reared larvae. Shells are placed into an aerated tank filled with seawater. When oyster larvae are introduced to the tank, they undergo metamorphosis and cement themselves to the clean, recycled shell that will provide shelter from predators and the calcium needed to build their own shell and buffer dangerous acidified waters. The shells loaded with young oysters are then returned to the pond. In addition to use in the hatchery, 20-40 cubic yards of shell are also returned to Tisbury and Edgartown Great Ponds for bottom shelling. Planted shell provides a hard, calcium-based substrate for wild oyster larvae in the same way it does for hatchery reared larvae.
