Getting back the wild oyster

“The oyster habitat is gone,’’ said Prescott. “There hasn’t been a [stable] oyster reef in Wellfleet since 1770. It was fished out by early harvesters.’’

A compact man with a curly rim of white hair poking out from beneath his baseball cap, Prescott has seemingly boundless energy. Like a true scientist, he poses more questions than he can answer, a fact that does not seem to bother him at all.

“An oyster reef is a massive structure of living organisms, the ecological equivalent of coral reefs,’’ he said. “How do we rebuild it? This is a giant scientific experiment to get us to the point where we can restore habitat.’’

The oysters here in the 1960s were dispersed as strong tides, shifting sands, and prevailing winds changed the landscape. Without a reef, there was nothing to hold the oysters in place.

“It’s a dilemma,’’ Prescott said. “How do you put oysters back in an area where the sand is moving? This is the most challenging aspect of creating a stable reef. How do you put a foundation under a reef? What do you use for substrate?’’

The enormous tidal flow in Wellfleet Bay is part of what makes its oysters so tasty, but it is also problematic for establishing a wild reef. In a mere six hours the sand on which we are standing will be under 10 feet of water.

We traipse across the flats in knee-high boots or sturdy sneakers, attempting to keep up with Prescott, who offers a running commentary on life on this spit of land. What I saw as only sand in fact teems with life. There are horseshoe crab tracks, fiddler crabs, mud snails (“the scavenger of the salt marsh’’), glassy tube worms, a smattering of oysters, razor clams, and the egg masses of lug worms, long gelatinous forms that look like jellyfish.