DOMINIC McAFEE - Marine Ecologist, University of Adelaide - Restoring Lost Oyster Reefs
/Marine Ecologist · University of Adelaide · Restoring Lost Oyster Reefs
There's this real emergence of young people doing incredible things enabled by bio-modern technology and a more globalized and connected world and access to amazing educational resources about what the environment does and means for humanity. We've lost something like 85% of oyster reefs globally. In Australia it's over 99%. We've smashed this ecosystem to smithereens. It covered something like 7,000 kilometers of coastline and the flat oyster reef, for example, the flat oysters, one type of oyster that we work with were completely removed from the Australian mainland, and about 5,000 kilometers of reef destroyed in a very short period of time. And because of the intensity with which the coastlines were modified following European settlement of Australia, they haven't been able to come back naturally.