The Oyster is His World

Dr. Niels Lindquist of Leland-based SANDBAR Oyster Company shares his revolutionary approach to growing oysters, building reefs and protecting shorelines.

Sometimes, the smallest living things have the largest impact on our planet. Such is the case with the oysters that cling to our country’s coastlines.

Here in Leland, Dr. Niels Lindquist, CEO of SANDBAR Oyster Company, is pioneering a way to keep the oyster population thriving from the Carolinas to the San Francisco Bay with the invention and manufacturing launch of its trademarked, biodegradable Oyster Catcher™.

Originally from Gainesville, Florida, Lindquist received his bachelor’s degree in chemistry from the University of Florida, conducted Ph.D. research in natural products chemistry and chemical ecology at the University of California at San Diego’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography, and continued marine chemical ecology research as a post-doctoral associate and then faculty member at the University of North Carolina’s Institute of Marine Sciences (IMS) in Moorehead City.

Lindquist and co-founder Joel Fodrie have a goal to solve current problems and create new ways to bolster oyster growth and restore estuarine habitats as well as improve the quality and productivity of coastal ecosystems.

“In 2009 I started making a transition from working in coral reef environments to oyster reefs and North Carolina waters,” Lindquist says. “We have a long history of oyster work at the IMS and the UNC Marine Lab in Morehead City.”

That transition from coral to oyster reefs, he says, unfortunately was due to the life-threatening trajectory of coral, its ecology and its restoration.

“That brought me to oysters and connected me to what I was doing with coral reefs through some of the critters that live in corals and live in oysters,” Lindquist says. “It’s been a wonderful move because oysters have a life history that’s kind of like a weed — they grow fast and they reproduce in huge numbers, and there’s an unlimited supply of oysters in the waters at the larval stage. It’s just a matter of what you give them and where you place it to give them maximum opportunity to thrive and grow into a really nice reef system.”

This is where SANDBAR’s Oyster Catcher substrate entered the waters. Lindquist and Fodrie landed grants through the North Carolina Sea Grant program. They involved Carteret County commercial fishermen, including Adam Tyler and the late David “Clammerhead” Cessna, in the research that took place between 2010 and 2015.

“Through our conversations, we came up with the idea for the cement-infused cloth typically used in erosion-controlled blankets made with jute, which is a product from a plant grown in South Asia,” Lindquist explains.

The group ordered the material in bulk, took cement to make a water-based slurry, cut the pieces of that cloth (it is shipped in bolts) and massaged the cement slurry into the fibers.

“Then we take that out and form these little modular pieces, which is what we use for creating, basically, a framework or a scaffold for oysters to settle on and grow,” Lindquist says. “And as they grow, they fill in all the space between the elements of the reef.”

Today the Oyster Catcher™ is patented by UNC, with SANDBAR Oyster Company having the commercialization rights for their invention. The most recent local project was installing a 165-foot-long living shoreline on the creek side of the marina on Bald Head Island. Other projects extend north into Virginia and south into Georgia.

Oyster reefs are typically installed in the lower half of the tide range in the coastal Carolinas, Lindquist says, where waters are really salty. Oysters won’t survive in deeper water, where there is more marine life competition, but they can withstand a lot of environmental stress in that intertidal zone, where they endure the summer heat and the sub-freezing temperatures in the wintertime, when they are exposed.

“We rely on oysters because they’re critical for the reefs to grow and become big, robust and self-sustaining,” Lindquist says.

Oysters begin as male larvae, when they first settle and start growing, and then transition into females. It could take a couple of years for a reproductive female to produce babies in large quantities.

SANDBAR’S mission is to restore these oyster- and salt marsh-based ecosystems, which are key to improving coastal fisheries, restoring critical estuarine habitats and protecting coastal properties and communities.

Lindquist says this is particularly imperative amidst the recent impacts of shoreline erosion and flooding, growing coastal populations, rising sea levels and intensifying storms.

“Water levels are rising,” he says. “There’s not any debate about that, and we have a lot of water-level monitoring stations up and down the coast … one right in Beaufort that’s operated by NOAA. If you look at the trajectory of the water-level rise over the last decade or two decades, it’s pretty scary.”

He adds that shorelines are feeling the stress of those rising waters, and the water is going to start coming up faster.

“So there is a lot out there to protect,” Lindquist continues. “But with oysters, if you build the reef the right way and people don’t come in and harvest your oysters, those reefs can grow faster than sea levels are rising. … That’s one thing I want to let people know: that you have this animal that lives in our waters and grows on our coast, and if you use them in the right way, they can do tremendous things for you.”

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