Allie Wharf’s career unfolded amid conflict. As a senior foreign producer for Newsnight, she reported on Iraq and Afghanistan. Just two years ago, she was filming mass graves in Ukraine.
But burnt out by wars, and after a detour farming ducks in Tanzania, Wharf has now settled on the quiet north Norfolk coast. Here, alongside her life and business partner, Willie Athill, she has embarked on a different kind of mission: the creation of Europe’s largest natural oyster reef.
The Luna Oyster Project, a collaboration between Norfolk Seaweed and Oyster Heaven, aims to restore 4 million oysters to the North Sea, using the first-ever mass deployment of mother reef bricks.
These fired clay structures provide the skeleton of a lost world. Centuries of bottom trawling and human impact have stripped historical oyster reefs bare, leaving only scattered fragments of what was once a teeming underwater landscape across Britain and Europe. These reefs, long absent, are now poised to anchor a new era of marine life along the coast.
Luna’s new mother reefs have recently been installed 2 miles out to sea. In April, millions of baby oysters from Morecambe Bay will be rehoused in their nooks and crannies, slowly forming their own natural reefs that could one day connect with smaller restoration projects to the north and south, forming a living lattice of biodiversity along England’s North Sea coastline.
“It’s been very expensive and time-consuming,” Wharf admitted. “Our licence application was 280 pages and cost six figures.” Securing the licence took more than three years. George Birch from Oyster Heaven said: “None of the licences care that you’re restoring biodiversity. We had to jump through the same hoops as oil and gas platforms.”
Beyond the paperwork, the job itself demands delicate attention. “You have to tend to oysters like babies,” Wharf said. “It’s like a sweet nursery. We’re even considering whether to play the music of the sea to them; it has to be recorded locally because they’re very sensitive to different sea sounds.” Birch called the reefs “living soil”, sparks of life on an otherwise barren seabed.
Oysters are astonishingly fecund. Across multiple spawning seasons, over a lifespan of 10 years or more, a single female can release tens of millions of eggs, even though the vast majority perish before they ever find a surface to cling to.
The oysters are not for eating, but the restoration is more than a purely ecological exercise. It is also a community endeavour. The project has employed local ecologists, project managers and crew, reviving skills and livelihoods that once thrived around oyster and mussel farming.
Birch said: “Historically, the North Sea was crystal-clear, unrecognisable compared to today’s muted waters, because trillions of oysters were filtering the waves, each little creature cleansing 200 litres of water every day.”
Native oyster reefs also act as natural wave breaks, stabilising coastlines, fostering biodiversity and transforming flat seabeds into complex, three-dimensional ecosystems teeming with life.
“A reef will create an entire ecosystem out of a barren seabed,” said Birch. “We did a trial run on a virtually bare seabed in the Netherlands and after one year, there were 12.7 million brand-new crabs, worms, fish, microbes and fungi on the reefs.”
That is why the project is largely funded by Purina, the pet food company. “What they are buying from us is supply-chain resilience,” said Birch. “Purina source fish from the North Sea for their products and need to know that resource is going to be sustainable and high-quality. By improving the marine environment, that’s what our oysters are doing for them.”
Oysters themselves are exquisitely sensitive, responding to light, pressure and sound. Not only can they change sex but Birch described realising that his hatchery female oysters were only spawning eggs on Mondays.
“We were, like, ‘How do they know it’s Monday?’” he said. “Then we realised that Mondays come after the two quiet weekend days, showing they were aware of the peacefulness in the room around them at the weekend and so felt safe enough to mature their eggs. How awesome is that?”
From the chaos of war zones to the meticulous care of microscopic life, Wharf, Athill and Birch are cultivating tiny, perceptive lives that will quietly transform the seabed into vibrant ecosystems – hopefully reshaping the North Sea.
“One of the most beautiful things that I’ve discovered about oysters is how sensitive they are,” said Birch. “They can sense pressure changes in the air outside the water: if you open a door into the hatchery room, they’ll all shut their shells. They know you’ve come in.”
