Oysters in Winter

Dear all,

For today's MindLetter, I found myself clicking through the research pieces on the UoE research and innovation homepage, a chocolate box of brilliant work underway across the University. One or two spoke to me...

Oysters in Winter

The sky is a colour palette of greys. Waves thud and crash, foaming on the shoreline. Crows pick at skeins of clams, piddocks and razor clams, left by the departing tide. Gulls cry forlornly. Hope slithers over seaweed as she contemplates a dash, but the birds, both black and grey, are as elusive as squirrels. They squawk with indignation, an untidy flap of wings as they lever themselves out of reach. Hope wheels back around as if she was only in it for the chase, anyway. My hood is cinched tight around my face against the wind; the cold penetrates coat, jeans, shoes, gloves. This is the Firth of Forth in winter.

On the Lothian beaches, shells shift as you cover ground. At Portobello it’s the clams; in Musselburgh – well, mussels. At Seton Sands, it is oysters, of momentous size and shape. I first encountered these scaly-backed creatures during the pandemic: enormous, they spanned the palm of my hand and more; my fingers could not quite close over them. They seemed to me like prehistoric treasure, secrets of the deep, washed up with the starfish and urchins in winter storms. I took a handful home from that lockdown trip, and they weighed down my pockets, and then my shelves. I have seen them almost every day for five years. I keep soap and air plants in them; I think, often, of the number of growth rings I counted in fives, tens, twenties, the moment I realised that my oysters were eighty years old. Older than my grandmother.

Younger, though, than the heyday of oysters in Europe. Six generations ago, ‘Oysters were found in their millions, clustered together in reef systems that spanned hundreds of square kilometres,’ write Philine zu Ermgassen (postdoc in Zoology at UoE) and Ruth H. Thurstan. ‘Now the reefs are gone.’ From Charles Dickens to Sarah Waters, accounts of Victorian London are filled with oysters. They were a democratic protein source, feeding rich and poor alike; on Oyster Day each August, the streets of London were lined with oyster stalls, children playing long-since-disappeared games with the shells.

Closer to home, on the east coast of Scotland, 30 million oysters a year were landed in the 1830s. Fifty years later, this had dropped to 300,000; by the 1950s they were locally extinct. What zu Ermgassen and Thurstan’s research emphasises is not just the loss of oysters, but the transformation of the sea depths beneath them. Oyster reefs are fantastical to look at, like the enchanted grounds of magical creatures, grottos of millions of molluscs that extend both up from and along the seafloor. Today, these and their attendant ecologies of marine organisms large and small have vanished. Most wild populations today have a mere one oyster per square metre.

The loss the researchers describe is dizzying. When I think now of my shells from the beach at Seton Sands, I fear that they are relics of more than merely time. There is a sense of horror, even. And yet I don’t regret perusing this research, with its stark numbers, its images of oyster markets gone by. Zu Ermgassen and Thurstan end in optimistic spirits: ‘Rediscovering the fact that oyster reefs were once extensive and abundant matters,’ they write. While ‘remnant patches are important and need protecting, our historical findings should urge us to be more ambitious in restoring the seafloor.’ They offer a blueprint for what the future of Europe’s oyster beds could hold, a sense of possibility, of even ‘ambition’.

It is tempting, sometimes, to hide from the past as a means of salving our despair about what we think it means for the future. But this in turn only impoverishes our understanding of who and where we are, diminishing us like the sterile ground of old oyster beds. Imagination, creativity, luck – all these will be needed in the myriad environmental challenges we face, and the actualities – scale, depth, longevity – of what has been can give succour to thoughts of what might be. If oyster reefs once carpeted the European sea floor like the wildest enchanted garden of a world gone by, our ambitions for their future might be just a little larger, a little longer. When Hope and I walk, now, by that foaming winter sea, I know it more deeply. I hold the hope of eighty-year-old oysters, plucked from the shore in six generations’ time, and an abundance we had the ambition to foresee.

Warm wishes for this cold weekend,

Kitty