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Andy Woolmer
Andy Woolmer in his survey boat Triton, with the dredge he uses to investigate progress on this sea bed. Photograph: D Legakis/Athena Pictures
Andy Woolmer in his survey boat Triton, with the dredge he uses to investigate progress on this sea bed. Photograph: D Legakis/Athena Pictures

Bringing oysters back home to Britain

This article is more than 8 years old

Overfishing, pollution and disease destroyed them, but Andy Woolmer – a former postman with a PhD in marine biology – is determined to put the shellfish back

“If I fall in, press this.” It’s a small button with a red plastic cover and the word “distress” written on it. Andy Woolmer, fisheries scientist, is showing me the safety features of his 17-foot survey boat, Triton. There are fire blankets, a VHF radio and flares. We putter through Swansea marina, past fancy motorboats and sailing yachts, with cloudless blue skies overhead and I find it hard to imagine we’ll need the emergency kit. Then Woolmer points out a wind turbine spinning merrily around. “It wasn’t moving when I drove past earlier,” he says.

We’re heading across Swansea Bay to a spot where 18 months ago Woolmer poured 50,000 oysters on to the seafloor. His plan is to restore a species and a fishery that have both been gone for a century. Now it’s time to see how his oysters are getting on.

Wild oysters used to be abundant around Britain, creating rich ecosystems where other marine wildlife flourished. These are not the introduced Pacific oysters that are farmed almost everywhere and shovelled down in oyster bars worldwide. European natives are a flatter, rounder, more delicate species and we’ve been eating them for centuries. In the heyday of British oyster fishing in the mid-1800s, three men in a sailboat could gather 3,000 oysters in a few hours. Then came the perfect storm of massive overfishing, industrial pollution and a mysterious and deadly oyster disease. Native oysters are not extinct – you can still find the odd one here and there – but they no longer lie around in huge piles.

Woolmer’s oyster ambitions began five years ago when he found maps from the 1920s showing where oysters once could be found. A government fisheries researcher had travelled along the Welsh coast asking fishermen where they used to catch oysters. He was gathering what nowadays is known as local ecological knowledge. “It’s basically picking people’s brains,” says Woolmer. The maps showed Swansea Bay used to be full of oysters, which gave Woolmer the idea of going back to see what’s there now. Using drop-down cameras, he searched the seabed and found empty shells but virtually no living oysters.

The area around Mumbles pier could host its own oyster hatchery and visitor centre Photograph: Robert Harding/REX Shutterstock

It was at a London meeting soon after that Woolmer vowed to try to reintroduce the lost shellfish. Scientists were busy discussing the intricacies of oyster biology and the possibilities of restoration and he was stunned by the lack of action. “There’s been a lot of talk about this for years, but no one ever does anything,” he says.

“I think I’d had too much coffee that morning and was feeling particularly bloody-minded when I started filling out the forms for funding.” He raised £88,000 from a European fisheries grant and the Welsh government and set out to prove whether or not oyster restoration could work. Originally, he wanted to use the money to purchase small oysters – the size of a 50-pence piece – and rear them in Swansea Bay. But natives are so rare that he couldn’t find enough babies to buy. The plan changed to bringing in mature oysters from Loch Ryan in Scotland – one of the last few healthy, wild populations of native oysters – to see if they would spawn, send baby oysters into the bay to kickstart Welsh oyster fisheries after a hundred-year hiatus.

It’s no surprise that Woolmer thinks differently to the average fisheries scientist. His love of the sea was nurtured growing up in Brighton in the 70s, where he learned to surf and sail dinghies but without the modern luxury of wetsuits. “We just wore jeans,” he tells me. “I used to walk home soaked. It was horrible.” At the time, he had no idea he could make a living from the sea. He left school at 16 and, following in his father’s footsteps, worked for years as a postman.

It was only after travelling the world for a while and coming back jobless that Woolmer visited a careers adviser and mentioned his passion for the sea. She suggested an access scheme that fast-tracked people through A-levels and into university. Why not study marine biology? Inspired by images in National Geographic of the huge kelp tanks at Monterey Bay Aquarium in California, he dreamed of working in what he describes as the “cathedral for marine biologists”.

At Swansea University he painstakingly picked out the tiny creatures living on the gnarled roots of those giant seaweeds. That led to a PhD studying the seabed of Carmarthen Bay where similar microscopic creatures are devoured by flocks of threatened ducks called scoters. Later he worked on boats in the North Sea. “I realised I get on very well with fishermen and I understand what the conservationists want, too.” He went freelance, setting up his consultancy Salacia Marine named after the wife of Poseidon, the Greek god of the sea.

Back on Triton, another Greek sea god, we make slow, wet progress across Swansea Bay. I learn to brace myself as we skip through the air, then duck the splash that comes when we slam back down.

The test site is a 35-hectare area of seabed adjoining the iconic twin-humps of the Mumbles islands. When the oyster fishery collapsed in the late 1800s, the Mumbles and neighbouring Oystermouth were devastated, putting hundreds of people out of work. Children used to welcome in each oyster season by building oyster shell grottos along the waterfront. Millions of oysters went to London by train; plenty were scoffed in local pubs, washed down with pints of oyster stout.

Just as Woolmer is preparing to lower a small metal dredge, the engine lets out a high-pitched squeal. He looks worried. The waves are getting higher and he takes the skipper’s decision to abort our mission. He won’t risk having a dredge in the water if the engine decides to give up. We limp back towards the marina and find calmer water. Woolmer estimates that the 50,000 mature oysters he brought in could have released 50 billion larvae last summer. Now that spring is here, those same adult oysters should be ready to spawn again.

“It’s a numbers game,” he says. Even if a tiny proportion of the larvae survived, that is a lot of baby oysters. “They’ve got to end up somewhere.” His idea isn’t simply to restore oysters within his patch at Mumbles, but to bring them back throughout the bay.

There’s no avoiding the fact that this will be a long-term process. Oysters don’t fall in line with three-year funding cycles and Woolmer is having to think creatively to find ways of making it work. With Triton safely back in port we drive around to the Mumbles pier. It was designed to service Swansea Port and never intended to be a pleasure pier, which is what the current owners, Fred Bollom and his family, are aiming for. But they, too, need to think long-term and are facing huge maintenance bills.

European native oysters are a flatter and more delicate species than the Pacific oysters farmed almost everywhere Photograph: Gerard Lacz/REX

At the end of the pier is a new lifeboat station. The RNLI paid to restore this, with ornate blue-and-white railings and new decking. By the shore is an amusement arcade and restaurant. Bollom has a vision of setting up another restaurant in the old lifeboat house connected to the pier, and serving up the oysters that are grown underneath.

“This whole thing is a route to changing people’s attitudes towards seafood,” says Woolmer. Later this year he and Bollom plan to start rearing young oysters right around the pier – if Woolmer can find any to buy in. They’re also keen to set up an oyster hatchery in one of Bollom’s ramshackle buildings along the shoreline. This will “close the loop”, Woolmer says, meaning they won’t rely on bringing in baby oysters from elsewhere. A visitors’ centre would also educate people about the molluscs and the historic fishery. “All piers need to find a purpose,” Bollom says.

My appetite has returned and we sit down to plates of fish and chips. On his laptop, Woolmer shows me photos of two native oysters found on his site in December. They’ve been growing well and each one has a small oyster, thumbnail sized, stuck on its back.

“Oysters are simple things. Give them enough food in the right place and they’re just going to breed.” He makes it sound easy – as if he’s forgotten all the barriers he’s had to find a way around. Now that he’s shown it’s possible for oysters to thrive here, perhaps there will be less talking and more doing elsewhere, too. Others are queuing up to follow Woolmer’s lead. He just got back from consulting on a Blue Marine Foundation project, which plans to bring oysters back to the Solent. “It’s not difficult,” he says. “We’ve just got to do it.”

Spirals in Time: The Secret Life and Curious Afterlife of Seashells by Helen Scales is published by Bloomsbury at £16.99 on 7 May. Buy it for £10.39 from the Guardian bookshop.

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