2026

New York City restaurants are giving discarded oyster shells a second life by keeping hundreds of pounds of them out of landfills every day and sending them to a project rebuilding oyster reefs across New York Harbor. The Billion Oyster Project collects more than 300,000 pounds of shells from participating restaurants each year, equivalent to…

Cerio began planning a bird sanctuary soon after buying Paradise Farm. (Newport History Society photo) Mabel Norman Cerio spent much of her life between art and nature at Paradise Farm in Middletown, Rhode Island. In 1908, she bought the coastal property from the estate of her brother after the death of her father. Decades later,…

In the 1970s, British aquaculture businesses imported North American signal crayfish to stock farms, hoping to build a profitable new freshwater fishery. But the plan backfired: the hardy invaders escaped into rivers, multiplied rapidly and spread across England, Wales and Scotland. Today they dominate many waterways and carry crayfish plague, a disease that is usually…