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Seawilding

@seawilding

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Seawilding is a Scottish charity working with communities to restore native oysters and seagrass, vital eco-system engineers for healthy inshore seas

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At Seawilding, we’ve learnt over the years that it’s not just what you do that matters, but how you share it. Telling the story of restoration is almost as important as the work itself!

That’s why we decided to add an underwater photography course to our Restoration School, helping aspiring seawilders develop the skills to capture and share the amazing underwater habitats and marine life happening beneath the surface.

Our first course was a great success, judging by some of the fantastic photos taken by our participants! by @seawilding

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a day ago

Promising new insights into oyster survival from our BESE bag experiments! Over the past year, we've been trialing different ways of deploying native oysters directly onto the seabed, with the aim of reducing losses from predation and sediment burial. We've been testing several configurations of biodegradable BESE mesh bags: some containing just oysters, others with oysters mixed with cultch (shell material), and some raised off the seabed on platforms of shell.
One year on, the results are looking encouraging! We're seeing around 70–75% oyster survival in BESE bags, compared with just 59% in open crates without BESE protection. That's less than 3% losses per month, with relatively consistent mortality across summer and winter.
Of the different methods, raising BESE bags on beds of cultch appears to be the most successful, achieving a mean survival of 75% over 12 months, significantly higher than the unprotected crates. Interestingly, survival also varied slightly between adult and juvenile oysters. Adult oysters performed particularly well in bags containing a mixture of oysters and cultch, with median survival reaching 82%.
There's still plenty more to investigate, but these initial results are an encouraging indication that biodegradable BESE bags could offer an affordable, sustainable way to improve oyster survival on the seabed and support native oyster restoration.
As ever, none of this monitoring would have been possible without the enthusiasm and dedication of our fantastic volunteers! A huge thank you to everyone who came along, helped count oysters and made this work possible. by @seawilding

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3 days ago

Our Seawildlings youth group have created this brilliant short animated film, under the wonderful direction of @violamadau_visual.

Made by our High School group as part of their John Muir Award challenge, which they’re now very close to completing, we’re delighted to share the finished film with you. We hope you enjoy it! 🌊💙 by @seawilding

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10 days ago

Great news from our Ganavan site! This week we were back on site with the team from Oban @seaweedgardens to see how the seagrass trials we planted in June are getting on. The results are really encouraging. More than 90% of the bundles we planted have survived, and they’re showing lots of healthy new growth. On average, the seagrass has expanded to cover more than twice the area it did when planted, increasing from around 5% cover to 12%. Some bundles have reached as much as 20% cover, four times their starting area.

It's a great indication that the site at Ganavan is suitable for seagrass restoration. Over the next few months, we’ll be working with the Seaweed Gardens gang to explore what comes next, including the potential to scale up planting across a wider area at Ganavan. Exciting times ahead! by @seawilding

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11 days ago

We are so proud of our newest Seawilding recruit, Lorna Farquhar, for speaking truth to power yesterday, telling politicians at the Scottish Parliament “young people are not asking for miracles, we’re asking for courage, leadership, for a shift in mind-set that recognises that Scotland’s marine environment is not a barrier to our future, protecting it IS our future”.

Lorna was speaking at ‘Future Seas: Young People’s Perspectives’, where young people from around Scotland called on Members of the Scottish Parliament to do more to protect our seas for future generations.

After over a decade of waiting, the Scottish Government has finally launched the consultation to bring protection from destructive bottom trawling to the network of inshore Scottish Marine Protected Areas. Seawilding welcomes this, but we do NOT believe the proposals are visionary or ambitious enough to reverse the consequences of decades of destruction of the seabed that’s led to a wholesale collapse in marine biodiversity. Young people want meaningful action!

Watch Lorna’s full speech on our YouTube channel — it’s well worth a listen! (link in our bio) @bluemarinefoundation by @seawilding

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a month ago

For the last few weeks, we've been measuring, counting and recording the thousands of native oysters we've been restoring to the Loch Craignish seabed. To reduce mortality from predatory crabs and starfish, we've been trialling containing native oysters in "bese" string bags made from potato starch. They work. Mortality is low, the oysters are large and fat, the bags are still intact and we owe a big cheer to all the volunteers, especially the wonderful GPs who travelled from as far as London to spend a Saturday counting and measuring 4,000 oysters off the seabed. Back in the Spring, we reported that genetic analysis shows that many of the wild oysters we find are the offspring of the stock we've introduced, and last Friday, with volunteers from @scotlandtbp, we set out to count and measure all the wild oysters on a section of Loch Craignish foreshore. By placing plastic cones on every oyster so a drone could film overhead, we found an excellent way of measuring density and distribution. There were lots and what fun we had! Thanks to all the enthusiastic volunteers who'd travelled from as far as the South of England and the Outer Hebrides to take part. by @seawilding

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a month ago

🌊 Places still available!

We’ve teamed up with @scotlandtbp again this year to deliver a Seagrass and Native Oyster learning day here in Loch Craignish on 11th September.

The day will explore the role of native oysters and seagrass in rewilding our seas, with a mix of discussion and hands-on learning. We’ll cover:

🦪 Native oyster restoration:
- How to get a project started
- Opportunities, challenges and barriers
- Survey techniques for monitoring wild and restored oyster populations
- A practical oyster survey at one of our restoration sites
🌱 Seagrass restoration:
- Where to begin and how to conduct a survey
- Best practise for undertaking a restoration project.

Find out more or book your place via the link in our bio. by @seawilding

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2 months ago

Last week we welcomed a new group of students to our Restoration School to learn all about seagrass skills in restoration, mapping and monitoring. This 3-day course combines theory with hands-on activities, giving the group a chance to put into practice what they had learned in the classroom. Special thanks to Dusty the dog for providing outstanding surface safety cover! 🐾 And thanks too to everyone who joined us! 🌱💚 #seawildingrestorationschool @highlands_islands_environment @eiggguiding @mcs_uk @naturescot by @seawilding

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2 months ago

Hot on the heels of our Summer Newsletter, our 2026 video is now live!

Catch up on what we’ve been up to this year and see the Seawilding story in action. Link in our bio 😊 by @seawilding

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2 months ago

Last week's seashore safari was fin-tastic! My highlights are the Sea Spider and our elusive European eel.. some of the fascinating life in our #hopespot @argyllhopespot #education #wildlife #educational #sealife taken in Carsaig Bay by @seawilding

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2 months ago

The Seawilding Garden, displayed at RHS Chelsea Flower Show 2025, is thriving in its forever home.

Designed by @musalandscape, the garden and its planting is inspired by the landscape of Loch Craignish on Scotland’s west coast, home to the @Seawilding project. The rugged coastline is part of a rich marine environment where Seawilding is focusing on the reintroduction of two keystone species - seagrass (Zostera marina) and native oysters (Ostrea edulis).

Since the show, the garden has been relocated back to Craignish and is maintained by local volunteers. The majority of the garden now lives in the middle of the village of Ardfern, behind the primary school, which is called ‘Talamn An Righ’ (The King’s Playground) - a green space with a roundhouse that is used for community events. The remainder has been dispersed around the peninsula with the sculpture incorporated into a sculpture trail at Lunga.

Learn more: givingback.org.uk/our-gardens/the-seawilding-garden

#gardensforgoodcauses #projectgivingback #RHSChelseaflowershow #seawilding by @seawilding

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2 months ago

Today we were taking advantage of the spring tides and good weather to deploy biodegradable mesh @beseproducts bags with a mixture of empty shells and live oysters in Loch Broom. This approach has worked very well to reduce predation of oysters in Loch Craignish, we are hopeful it will do the same in the North. by @seawilding

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2 months ago