Americans seem to have lost touch with the fact that oysters are a seasonal food. In France, the largest oyster-producing country in the Western world, 80 percent of the entire oyster harvest is consumed in the week between Christmas and New Year’s. The best reason not to eat oysters in the summer is that they don’t taste very good—unless you import them from the Southern Hemisphere.
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Robb Walsh
Sandy Ingber, head chef and oyster buyer at the Grand Central Oyster Bar in New York, says he's bringing in extra oysters for Valentine’s weekend
Robb Walsh
Jon Rowley, known as the P.T. Barnum of the oyster industry, made Totten Inlet Virginica oysters famous
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It was the Clean Water Act of 1972 that got the “Great American Oyster Renaissance” started. Once we cleaned up our rivers and streams, salt marshes and estuaries that had been stagnant and clogged with algae cleared up. Crabs and fish began to appear where they hadn’t been seen in decades. Natural oyster reefs came back, and tidelands where oysters had once been cultivated were viable again.
But there have been problems along the way. And now the oyster industry is responding to a new set of challenges. Texas Parks & Wildlife’s Lance Robinson said the state will spend some $2 million to restore oyster reefs in Galveston Bay that were damaged by Hurricane Ike. About half the money will be spent to dredge up oyster shells from under the debris to provide hard surfaces for oyster spats to adhere to. The other half will go to creating artificial reefs by dropping concrete chunks and other hard materials to form new substrate. But the reefs will be closed for several years after the restoration project to give the new oysters a chance to grow.
In the short term, there will be fewer oysters. But hurricanes have been pounding the Gulf Coast since the beginning of time. Oysters are resilient. Whenever they sense changes in water temperature or salinity, they go into a reproductive orgy, ensuring their survival by spawning enormous clouds of offspring. Hopeful oyster-industry experts say there is every reason to expect that, two years from now, the Texas oyster harvest will be bigger than ever. Louisiana, the nation’s largest oyster-producing state, could return to full production in two years as well.
Meanwhile, some other oyster areas are taking up the slack. Bright spots include New Jersey, Florida and Mississippi, all of which have dramatically increased their production in the past three years.
But the problems with oyster larvae in Washington hatcheries are a much more frightening situation. The failure was originally attributed to an oyster pathogen called vibrio tubiashii. Last summer, newspaper stories reported that a $200,000 filtering system installed on one large hatchery would restore production to normal. But according to Bill Taylor, president of Taylor Shellfish, the oyster larvae are still dying despite the fact that vibrio tubiashii is no longer present.
Marine biologists suspect that the larvae are being affected by changes in the pH level of the seawater being pumped into the hatchery. Typically, seawater has a pH between 8.1 and 8.3; Taylor says the water at Taylor’s Quilcene hatchery on the Hood Canal is testing at levels as low as 7.2. (Lower pH equals higher acid.) The acidity is highest within a hundred miles of the Pacific Coast of North America. It hasn’t affected seed oysters that are already growing, but there is a shortage of new seed as fewer spats are forming in the hatchery.
And it’s not just the hatchery that is affected. “We used to see a natural spat set in places like Willapa Bay,” Taylor said. “But there hasn’t been a spat set in Willapa Bay in four years now.”
Taylor Shellfish has another hatchery, in Hawaii, that hasn’t been affected yet, so there will still be a source of seed for half-shell oysters for a while to come, Taylor said. But if ocean acidification turns out to be the root cause of the hatchery failures, the future of the American oyster industry may depend on how fast we can reduce the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
A shortage of oysters over the next couple of years may be inevitable. But will it be a temporary dip in a generally upward curve? Or are we at the pinnacle of the “Great American Oyster Renaissance,” looking at a long downhill slide?
“I have my fingers crossed,” Taylor said. “Ocean acidification has the potential to be worse than the pollution problems we solved with the Clean Water Act.”
Robb Walsh is the author of Sex, Death and Oysters: A Half-Shell Lover’s World Tour, which was released Jan. 20.
