Oyster farming is the kind of business an environmentalist should love: it doesn't use harmful chemicals or deplete natural resources, and the locally grown shellfish actually help clean the water.
It's a green, sustainable industry that brings nearly $1 million a year to growers in the New Jersey Delaware Bay area and puts shellfish on restaurant plates around the northeast.
But when that industry sits on the lone feeding ground in the western hemisphere for the largest population of a threatened species of shorebird, things get complicated.
New Jersey's oyster aquaculture industry is centered on the same Delaware Bay beaches that provide irreplaceable feeding grounds for the red knot on its annual 10,000-mile journey from South America to the Arctic. And that has environmentalists worried, particularly given the extensive efforts to restore Delaware Bay beaches damaged by Superstorm Sandy in 2012 that have succeeded in stabilizing the red knot population, albeit at lower levels.