Morro Bay used to grow oysters. Not many people remember that. The estuary's oyster beds collapsed in the early 2000s from a combination of acidification, sediment runoff, and a bacterial bloom that nobody saw coming. For twenty years, the bay's famous bivalves came from somewhere else.

Now three families — the Okamotos, the Trujillos, and a husband-and-wife team named Sáenz who moved from Baja — are bringing them back. Their secret isn't a secret at all: it's a Japanese technique called "spat-on-shell" that uses recycled oyster shells as nursery substrate, and a $1.2M NOAA grant they applied for on a whim and won on the first try.