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.
Robb Walsh
Virginica, Pacific, Kumamoto, and Olympia oysters all have their fans.
Robb Walsh
Jon Rowley made Totten Inlet virginica oysters famous.
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There have been problems along the way. And now the oyster industry is responding to a new set of challenges. Texas Parks and Wildlife's Lance Robinson says the state will spend some $2 million to restore oyster reefs in Galveston Bay damaged by Hurricane Ike. About half the money will be spent to dredge up oyster shells from under the debris and then use them 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 state hatcheries are frightening. 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 of 8.1 to 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's affected. "We used to see a natural spat set in places like Willapa Bay," Taylor says. "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 says. 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 says. "Ocean acidification has the potential to be worse than the pollution problems we solved with the Clean Water Act."
Robb Walsh is author of Sex, Death and Oysters: A Half-Shell Lover's World Tour, which was released January 20.
