[caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="500"] The state’s only native oyster once thrived along coastlines from Southeast Alaska to Baja, California. Photo by cswtwo/Flickr[/caption]

The Olympia oyster is the only oyster that’s native to California’s estuaries. In the 1800s, millions of Olys thrived in the San Francisco Bay, but today, only small remnants of those wild oyster populations remain. Olympias, as it turns out, are an incredibly efficient, sustainable solution to some of our most urgent environmental problems, including shoreline erosion and climate change. In this episode of Terra Verde, freelance journalist and host Amrita Gupta talks with Linda Hunter, founder and director of the Wild Oyster Project [1], and Ted Grosholz, a marine ecology researcher from the University of California, Davis, about how they’re paving the way for an Olympia oyster comeback. What do these conservation efforts look like? How can we get involved? And what are the challenges we can expect to face along the way? Tune in to find out.

[1] https://wildoysters.org