Ambitious restoration programme for Aussie oyster reefs

Ambitious restoration programme for Aussie oyster reefs. Oyster reefs carpeted thousands of kilometres of Australian coastline 200 years ago, but were dredged to near extinction within a century of colonial settlement. An ambitious nationwide restoration programme now seeks to bring them back. In South Australia, the largest reef restoration in the Southern Hemisphere, Windara Reef, was constructed in 2017 to restore the ecosystem of the native mud oyster, Ostrea angasi, off the Yorke Peninsula. Following construction of Windara Reef’s 149 individual reefs, a layer of fast-growing turf algae covered the new reef surfaces, forming a barrier to baby oysters trying to settle atop the reef. Such turf algae are a global phenomenon that is common on urbanised coasts where the algae opportunistically carpets hard surfaces. To help restore South Australia’s lost oyster reefs, Prof Sean Connell and Dr Dominic McAfee of the Southern Seas Ecology Lab in the School of Biological Sciences and ...