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The flat oyster (Ostrea edulis), today being rediscovered for its properties as an ecosystem engineer and sentinel species, had almost disappeared from European coasts at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, mainly due to overfishing. However, like forests, oyster beds have long been subject to regulatory measures aimed at “managing” in order to “conserve” them. Based on the study of a dispute over the use of underwater resources harvested from the seabed of Brest Roadstead, this article offers a conflictual history of conservation. Paying close attention to the actors and the archives they produced, it reconstructs the knowledge, instruments, and institutions developed by the members of a joint commission appointed in 1847 to establish a new system of exploitation within this territory located between land and sea. In so doing, it highlights the ambivalences inherent in attempts to manage nature: the concept of ménagement, omnipresent in the documentation, alternately means “using economically” (or even “taking care” of) maritime resources, “reconciling” the different interests involved in their exploitation, and, when the prefix a- is added to form aménager, “regulating” or “ordering” this exploitation in order to make it more “rational.”