Conservation News
Innovative Conservation Deal Protects Underwater Acres
By Cat Lazaroff
LONG ISLAND, New York, October 23, 2026 (ENS) - An oyster company has donated 11,500 acres along the bottom of the Great South Bay to The Nature Conservancy in the largest transaction of its kind in history. The unusual deal is an example of a new approach to marine conservation, one with the potential to restore marine habitat, improve water quality and protect many critical plant and animal species along the coastline of the United States and in marine areas around the world.
Bluepoints Oyster Company has donated the underwater property near Long Island, valued at about $2 million, to the Conservancy. The company will retain the right to harvest oysters from the tract, but other fishing companies will likely be kept out of the newly created underwater nature preserve, which will be managed for research, education, restoration and sustainable harvest.
"We'll be able to boast that our famous Bluepoints Long Island oysters are being raised in the middle of a nature preserve," explained Robert Nimkoff, senior vice president for seafood management at the First Republic Corporation of America, which owns the Bluepoints Company.
"Our marine and coastal ecosystems are under increasing threat," said Steve McCormick, president of The Nature Conservancy. "The increase in threat calls for an increase in innovative solutions, solutions like using a hallmark of the Conservancy's work - land acquisition - in a brand new way."
The Great South Bay acquisition is the Conservancy's most recent and biggest effort to expand land acquisition to marine conservation. The Conservancy has two other pieces of underwater property in Virginia and New York, and tidal zone land in Washington state.
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