Allie Wharf’s career unfolded amid conflict. As a senior foreign producer on Newsnight, she has reported on Iraq and Afghanistan. Just two years ago, she was photographing mass graves in Ukraine.
But after being scorched by wars, and after turning to duck farming in Tanzania, the Wharf now rests on the quiet north Norfolk coast. Here, alongside her life partner and business partner, Willie Athill, she embarked on a different mission: to create the largest natural oyster reef in Europe.
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 baked clay structures provide the skeleton of a lost world. Centuries of bottom trawling and human impact have stripped historic reefs of their shellfish, leaving only scattered fragments of what was once a crowded underwater landscape across Britain and Europe. These coral reefs, which had been absent for a long time, are now poised to anchor a new era of marine life along the coast.
A new mother reef was recently installed at Luna two miles offshore. In April, millions of baby oysters from Morecambe Bay will be rehomed in its nooks and crannies, slowly forming their own natural reef that could one day connect to smaller restoration projects to the north and south, forming a living network of biodiversity along England’s North Sea coast.
“It was very expensive and time-consuming,” Warf admitted. “Our license application was 280 pages long and cost six figures.” It took more than three years to secure the license. “None of the licenses are concerned with restoring biodiversity,” said George Birch of Oyster Heaven. “We had to jump through the same hurdles as oil and gas platforms.”
Beyond the paperwork, the job itself requires careful attention. “You have to take care of the oysters like a child,” Wharfe said. “It’s like a beautiful nursery. We’re even thinking of playing sea music for them; it has to be recorded locally because they are very sensitive to different sea sounds.” Birch called coral reefs “living soil,” sparks of life on the barren sea floor.
Oysters are surprisingly fertile. Over multiple breeding seasons, over a lifespan of 10 years or more, a single female can release tens of millions of eggs, although the vast majority die before they find a surface to cling to.
Oysters are not for eating, but restoration is more than a purely ecological practice. It is also a community endeavor. The project has employed local ecologists, project managers and staff, reviving skills and livelihoods that once flourished around oyster and mussel farming.
“Historically, the North Sea was crystal clear, unrecognizable compared to the silent waters of today, because trillions of oysters filtered the waves, with each tiny creature filtering 200 liters of water every day,” Birch said.
Native coral reefs also act as natural wave breakers, stabilizing coastlines, enhancing biodiversity, and transforming flat seabeds into complex, three-dimensional ecosystems teeming with life.
“The reef will create an entire ecosystem out of the barren sea floor,” Birch said. “We ran an experiment on an almost bare seafloor in the Netherlands, and after one year, there were 12.7 million completely new crabs, worms, fish, microbes and fungi on the reef.”
That’s why the project is largely funded by Purina, the pet food company. “What they are buying from us is supply chain flexibility,” Birch said. “Purina imports fish from the North Sea for its products, and needs to know that the resources will be sustainable and high quality. By improving the marine environment, this is what our oysters do for them.”
Oysters themselves are exquisitely sensitive, responding to light, pressure and sound. Not only can they change sex, Birch described realizing that the female oysters in his hatchery were only laying eggs on Monday.
He said: “We wondered how they know that today is Monday?” “Then we realized that Mondays come after the two quiet days on the weekend, which shows that they were aware of how quiet the room around them was on the weekend, so they felt safe enough to hatch their eggs. How cool would that be?”
From the chaos of war zones to the meticulous care of microscopic life, Wharf, Ethel and Birch are cultivating tiny, sentient life that will quietly transform the seafloor into vibrant ecosystems – hopefully reshaping the North Sea.
“One of the nicest things I’ve discovered about oysters is how delicate they are,” Birch said. “They can sense pressure changes in the air outside the water: if you open a door in a spawning chamber, they’ll all close their shells. They know you’ve entered.”