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Short abstract

This paper follows marine scientists in the North Sea studying the ecology of a presumably extinct oyster reef using a mussel reef as a proxy, approaching it as a problem of valuing slippery epistemic objects as well as the techniques to study what is not anymore and not yet there.

Long abstract

Rewilding practices that are concerned with restoring extinct ecosystems require learning about the ecological functioning of such ecosystems. This, however, poses a problem: How to learn about something that is not anymore and not yet there? In this paper I follow marine ecologists onboard a research vessel in the Scottish North Sea while they studied an offshore ephemeral mussel reef. Theirs was preliminary research within a larger project that aimed at rewilding ephemeral oysters’ reefs in the North Sea, which, unlike mussels, are presumably extinct. By sampling the reef and the biochemistry of the water above it, my interlocutors learned about the ecological relations of the benthic community of the reef. I approach the work of my interlocutors as a layered problem of valuing: When is an existing reef of a different species good enough to provide relevant ecological information that are helpful to rewild the extinct one? When is the sampling process good enough to learn about the relevant ecological functions of a reef? Inspired by the work of John Law and Marienne Elisabeth Lien (2013) on salmon farming, texture and slipperiness, I suggest that rewilding ephemeral reefs in the North Sea highlights the slipperiness and the elusiveness of finding epistemological proxies for extinct oyster reefs. Slipperiness here describes the responses of marine and oceanic environments as they tend to resist the research apparatuses of western science – one that rarely does well with fluidity and with that which escapes, changes and disappears.