Good whisky needs pure clean water, which partly explains why distilleries in Scotland always seem to have such scenic, loch-side backdrops. And one of the best ways to filter that water is oysters. Indeed, the European native oyster was so plentiful in Scotland that 30 million a year were harvested from oyster beds outside Edinburgh in the 1800s.
But today the species is almost extinct: populations have dropped by 85% over the past century, most likely because of overfishing from bottom trawling.
