Megan Hayes

Attachment is a pivotal moment in the life of an oyster. It marks the creature’s transformation from one who drifts, to one who will remain moored. Prior to attachment, an oyster lives as a free-swimming larva, roaming the currents of the brackish waters of their birthplace. After choosing their point of attachment, the baby oyster secretes a glue, cementing their body around a single point of contact to a hard surface, allowing them to hold on amidst the force of waves, currents, and flows. While they can find stable ground for attachment on a myriad of solid things, the larval oyster’s preferred site for settling in is an existing oyster shell, and it is thanks to this preference for attaching to one another that the collective form and strength of an oyster reef, or bed, is sustained. These collective oyster formations become environments and planetary embankments, holding ecologies—worlds—together, and yet oyster reefs are the most threatened marine habitat on the planet. It is from this context that this chapter explores multivalent constellations of oyster attachments, learning from what and how they hold.